bt my
power, now that I have promised to exercise it?"

"Who could?" he replied courteously. "Yet this young man poses, I
believe, as something of a St. Anthony. He may give you trouble."

"He is then, what you call a prig?"

"A most complete and perfect specimen, even in this nation of prigs!"

"All that you tell me," she sighed, "makes the enterprise seem easier.
It is, after all, rather like the lioness and the mouse, isn't it?"

The prince made no reply, but upon his lips there lingered a faintly
incredulous smile. The woman by his side leaned back in her place. She
had the air of accepting a challenge.

"After supper," she said, "we will see!"

* * * * *

A single chord of music in a minor key floated across the room, soft at
first, swelling later into a volume of sound, then dying away and
ceasing altogether. John, standing momentarily alone in a corner of the
picture-gallery, found it almost incredible that this wildly hilarious
throng of men and women could so soon, and without a single admonitory
word, break off in the midst of their conversation, stifle their mirth,
almost hold their breath, in obedience to this unspoken appeal for
silence. Every light in the place was suddenly extinguished. There
remained only the shaded lamps overhanging the pictures.

Not a whisper was heard in the room. John, looking around him in
astonishment, was conscious only of the half-suppressed breathing of the
men and women who lined the walls, or were still standing in little
groups at the end of the long hall. Again there came the music, this
time merged in a low but insistent clamor of other instruments. Then,
suddenly, through the door at the farther end of the room came a dimly
seen figure in white. The place seemed wrapped in a mystical twilight,
with long black rays of deeper shadow lying across the floor. There was
a little murmur of tense voices, and then again silence.

For a few moments the figure in white was motionless. Then, without any
visible commencement, she seemed suddenly to blend into the waves of
low, passionate music. The dance itself was without form or definite
movement. She seemed at first like some white, limbless spirit, floating
here and there across the dark bars of shadow at the calling of the
melody. There was no apparent effort of the body. She was merely a
beautiful, unearthly shape. It was like the flitting of a white moth
through the blackness of a moonl