nd the Princess Xenia have ever met each other
before.

"Seven years!" he thinks. "Good heavens! what an eternity! And she is
handsomer than she was then; very handsome; wonderfully handsome."

He looks at her all the while from under his half-closed eyelids, whilst
he talks he knows not what kind of rubbish to Lady Dawlish.

Xenia Sabaroff does not once look his way. The moment which she had
dreaded has passed, and it has made no impression whatever upon her: her
indifference reconciles her to herself. Is it possible, she wonders,
that she ever loved, or ever thought that she loved, this man?

"Why will you always treat me as a stranger, Madame Sabaroff?" murmurs
Gervase to her that night when for a moment he is alone near her, while
the cotillion overture commences.

"You are a stranger--to me," replies Xenia Sabaroff; and as she speaks
she looks full at him.

He colors with discomfiture. "Because in the due course of nature I have
succeeded to my father's title, you seem to consider that I have changed
my whole identity," he says, with great irritation.

She is silent; she looks down on the white ostrich-feathers of her fan.
He is vaguely encouraged by that silence. "Strangers! That is surely a
very cold and cruel word between those who once were friends?"

The direct appeal to her makes her look up once more, with great
_hauteur_ in the coldness of her face.

"Sir, I think when people have forgotten that each other exist, it is as
though they had never met. They are perhaps something more distant still
than strangers, for to strangers friendship in the future is possible;
but those who have been separated by oblivion on the one hand and by
contempt on the other are parted as surely and eternally as though death
had divided them."

Gervase gathers some solace from the very strength of the words. She
would not, he thinks, feel so strongly unless she felt more than he
allows: he gazes at her with feigned humility and unfeigned admiration
and regret.

"If Madame Sabaroff," he murmurs, "can doubt her own powers of
compelling remembrance, she is the one person on earth only who can do
so."

She is stung to anger.

"I am really at loss to decide whether you are intentionally insolent or
unintentionally insincere. You are possibly both."

"I am neither. I am only a man who passionately and uselessly rebels
against his fate."

"Who regrets his own actions, you mean to say. That is nothing
uncommon."

"W