me to town, they tell me," the Russian murmured.

"No, why should I?" Lilla returned, as if violently aroused from sleep.
She saw beyond Anna Zanidov, on the steps of the box, a man whose
visage was lined across the forehead and under the cheekbones, and who
showed, under his heavy, mouse-colored mustache, a stony, courteous
smile.

It was the new face of Cornelius Rysbroek.

"No, sit here," said the Russian, "I wish to talk with Fanny."

He seated himself beside Lilla, and, after watching a horse clear a
jump, remarked:

"Do you know I'm living near you?"

He had taken a house in Westchester County, five miles away from hers.
He had been looking for quiet, because he was writing a book about his
journey in China--"just for the fun of the thing."

"Yesterday," he added indifferently, "I happened to pass your gates.
At least I suppose they were. I had a mind to call."

His hands, clasped round his knee, attracted her unwilling notice.
They had become sinewy. He appeared like a hard-muscled elder brother
of the listless hypochondriac who in the old days had paid feeble court
to her: and strangeness enveloped him, not only because of the changes
in his body and character, but also because of the hardships and
escapes that he had experienced in the Chinese mountains. Yet in this
strangeness Lilla found a disturbingly familiar quality, like an echo
of something lost, a vague and diminished reapparition of an old ideal.

"Yes," she said softly, "I wish we could be friends again. But the
situation at home is so very delicate."

After a long silence, he uttered, so low that she could hardly hear him:

"Are there no other places?"

The band still played _Wiener Mad'l_.

"It's getting late," she faltered, wondering where she was going to
find the strength to rise from her chair.

"Yes, go back to your tomb. Are there any mirrors in it? Do you ever
look in them? Do you see in them what's happening to you? Your eyes
are losing their luster; you're getting haggard, and in a little while
one will see the bones under your skin. At this moment you look like
the devil." Without raising his voice, without ceasing to stare as
though bored at the old Russian silver box from which he was taking a
cigarette with trembling fingers, he pronounced malignantly, "You are
losing your beauty, Lilla--all that you ever had to plunge a man into
hell. Presently, thank God, there will be nothing to love."

It seemed to her t