ell, who regrets the past, if you will put it so, and who would atone
for it would you allow him."

"Atone! Do you suppose that you owe me reparation? It is I who owe you
thanks for a momentary oblivion which did me immeasurable service."

"That is a very harsh doctrine. The Princess Xenia whom I knew was
neither so stern nor so sceptical."

"The Princess Xenia whom you knew was a child, a foolish child; she is
dead, quite as much dead as though she were under so many solid square
feet of Baltic ice. Put her from your thoughts: you will never awake
her."

Then she rises and leaves him and goes out of the ball-room.

Throughout that evening he does not venture to approach her again, and
he endeavors to throw himself with some show of warmth into a flirtation
with Nina Curzon.

"Why did you pretend not to know her?" says Mrs. Curzon to him.

He smiles, the fatuous smile with which a man ingeniously expresses what
he would be thought a brute to put into words.

"She does not deign to know me--now," he says, modestly, and to the
experienced comprehension of Nina Curzon the words, although so modest,
tell her as much as the loudest boast could do.

CHAPTER IX.

Gervase saunters in to his hostess's boudoir the next morning, availing
himself of the privilege accorded to that distant relationship which it
pleases them both to raise into an intimate cousinship. It is a charming
boudoir, style Louis Quinze, with the walls hung with flowered silk of
that epoch, and the dado made of fans which belonged to the same period.
Lady Usk writes here at a little secretaire painted by Fragonard, and
uses an inkstand said to have belonged to Madame de Parabere, made in
the shape of a silver shell driven by a gold Cupidon; yet, despite the
frivolity of these associations, she contrives to get through a vast
mass of business at this fragile table, and has one of the soundest
heads for affairs in all England. Gervase sits down and makes himself
agreeable, and relates to her many little episodes of his recent
experiences.

She is used to be the confidante of her men; she is young enough to make
a friend who is attractive to them, and old enough to lend herself _de
bon c[oe]ur_ to the recital of their attachments to other women. Very
often she gives them very good advice, but she does not obtrude it
unseasonably. "An awfully nice woman all round," is the general verdict
of her visitants to the boudoir. She does not seek to be