, my surprise can wait."

Fanny Brassfield followed Brantome and his coterie into the music room,
her attractive, bony features revealing a quizzical expression. In the
glitter of the big chandelier her coiffure appeared extraordinarily
blonde, her green eyes, especially frosty; and the eighteenth century
ladies in the gilded frames seemed suddenly, despite their histories,
insipid in comparison with this modern face, emancipated from a
thousand traditional reactions.

As for Lilla, she was sitting in the dim library with Cornelius
Rysbroek, who was harping on the old tune.

CHAPTER VI

She believed that she could discern in him already the first hints of
middle age. His lifeless, brown hair was receding above his temples.
His small mustaches, which ought to have made him debonair, seemed on
his sallow face like the worthless disguise of a pessimist at the feast
of life.

Her look of compassion struck him silent. He smiled in self-contempt,
then uttered a sharp sigh, pressed his palm to his forehead, and
produced a tiny silver box, from which he took a tablet.

"More antipyrene?" she demanded reproachfully.

"My sinus is pretty bad to-night. This salt air blowing in from the
Sound----"

He declared that he was going away again. "His health made it
necessary." He had hung round New York long enough, enduring an
impossible climate because of an idiotic hope. He uttered the word
"Arizona." He spoke of hot deserts, solitudes under the stars, mirages
less mocking than his aspirations. As he contemplated her delicately
fervent face, her tapering, graceful body, wrapped like something very
precious in pale gold, his eyes glittered with tears.

"Dear Cornie----"

And once more she began the familiar rigmarole. Her lips shaped the
immemorial complaint, "Why isn't our friendship enough--why must we
always be clouding our old congeniality----" And so on. These
inexorable words, combined with her look of pity and reproach--a look
that seemed almost amorous on her fair face--gave him an impression of
immense perfidiousness.

He turned bitter. He asked her where the ideal suitor could be
loitering--the strange knight for whom she used to watch as a little
girl, the fairytale prince from another kingdom, who was to sweep her
off her feet by the force of his perfections, and carry her away.

As he spoke, there stole through the doorway the first notes of _Vienna
Carnival_. In the music room old Brant