e, though it seemed a failure, and was made--it may be, I dare not
judge him--blindly, and in a mistaken fashion; yet this effort has
to-night proved his own salvation, through you."

She stopped, and again the notes of the hymn sounded through the room.

"Carricchio was right," she went on, "when he told the Prince that you
alone of all of us had solved the riddle, for on you alone has art
exercised its supreme, its magic touch, in drawing out and developing
the emotions, the powers of the soul. You alone possessed the perfect
gift of nature--the untainted well-spring of natural life--which
assimilated Mark's spirit with your spirit, and reproduced his life
within your own."

Faustina dropped the Princess's hand, which she had taken, and bent her
head still lower, as if shrinking from her kindly praise.

"The Prince also had something of this gift, and, in so far as he had,
he built up by his own action what, in his supreme need, saved him from
his lower self. I have come to see that the world's virtues, which, in
my self-righteous isolation, I despised, are often, as I blindly said to
the boy, nearer Christ's than my vaunted ones; that the world-spirit is
often the Christ-spirit, and that, when we begin to see that His
footsteps may be traced in paths where we little expect to find them, we
shall no longer dare to talk of the secular life. Your little brother
that died was not without his work, and the canary even was the type of
a nobler life, even as Mark's death was the type of a nobler death. In
strange and unlooked-for ways the mission of sacrifice and love fulfils
itself, and, living in the full light of its influence, we can never
realise the blessing we have derived, the changed aspect of the race we
have inherited, from the Cross of Christ."

IX.

THE next evening there was given, at the Imperial Palace, a ball and
supper, to which none but _la haute noblesse_ were invited. The dancing
began with a brilliant Polonaise, which, headed by the Empress-Queen and
her husband, passed through the rooms in stately procession, in singular
and picturesque contrast and harmony with another faded and more solemn
procession and array of figures in antique armour and dainty ruffs and
doublets, and gold chains and princely mantles, the ancestral portraits
who watched the formal slow dance-movement from the walls.

After the Polonaise came the supper, which was somewhat prolonged. The
supper over, a minuet was