"paid his first visit to Covent Garden
to-night. He has seen his first ballet, as we moderns understand the
term. I cannot help envying him that delight. He naturally finds it
difficult to realize this additional good fortune. Will you excuse me
for one moment?"

The prince departed to welcome some later arrivals. The noisy little
group standing close at hand, from which John had been diverted, passed
on into the refreshment-room, and the two were, for a few moments,
almost isolated.

Even then John felt himself tongue-tied. Standing where she was, with
that background of dark oil-paintings lit only by shaded electric lamps,
she was more than ever like a wonderful old Egyptian statue into which
some measure of slow-moving life had been breathed. He recognized almost
with wonder the absence of any ornament of any sort on her neck or
fingers.

"You were pleased with the performance, I hope?"

Her voice was in character with her personality. It was extremely low,
scarcely louder than a whisper. To his surprise, it was almost wholly
free from any foreign accent.

"It was very wonderful," John answered.

"You understood the story?"

"Only partly," he confessed.

"Would you have recognized me, seeing me as you do now?"

"Never in the world," he assured her.

"Tell me why I am so different off the stage."

"On the stage," he replied, "you seem to me to be the embodiment of wild
movement. Here, you seem--forgive me--to be a statue. I can scarcely
believe that you walked across the room."

"It is my pose," she said calmly.

"Then you are a great actress as well as a great dancer," he declared.

For the first time the plastic calm of her features seemed disturbed.
She smiled, but even her smile seemed to him more like some mechanically
contrived alteration in the facial expression of a statue than anything
natural or spontaneous.

"The prince tells me," she continued, "that you are a stranger in
London. Give me your arm. We will walk to a quieter place. In a few
moments we are to be disturbed for supper. One eats so often and so
much in this country. Why do I say that, though? It is not so bad as in
Russia."

They passed across the polished wood floor into a little room with
Oriental fittings, where a lamp was swinging from the ceiling, giving
out a dim but pleasant light. The place was empty, and the sound of the
music and voices seemed to come from a distance. She sank down upon a
divan back among the sha