ish
glitter in her eyes. She was silent. Then--"I should need no hired bravo
to kill my lover if he forsook me!" she cried at last, and laughed, but
the marvelously wrought gold comfit box in her fingers was crushed by
her convulsive clutch.

"When are you to be Grand Duke?" asked the sixth. There was the frenzy
of a Bacchante in her eyes, and her teeth gleamed between the lips
parted with a smile of cruel glee.

"Yes, when is that father of yours going to die?" asked the seventh,
throwing her bouquet at Don Juan with bewitching playfulness. It was
a childish girl who spoke, and the speaker was wont to make sport of
sacred things.

"Oh! don't talk about it," cried Don Juan, the young and handsome giver
of the banquet. "There is but one eternal father, and, as ill luck will
have it, he is mine."

The seven Ferrarese, Don Juan's friends, the Prince himself, gave a cry
of horror. Two hundred years later, in the days of Louis XV., people of
taste would have laughed at this witticism. Or was it, perhaps, that
at the outset of an orgy there is a certain unwonted lucidity of mind?
Despite the taper light, the clamor of the senses, the gleam of gold and
silver, the fumes of wine, and the exquisite beauty of the women,
there may perhaps have been in the depths of the revelers' hearts some
struggling glimmer of reverence for things divine and human, until it
was drowned in glowing floods of wine! Yet even then the flowers had
been crushed, eyes were growing dull, and drunkenness, in Rabelais'
phrase, had "taken possession of them down to their sandals."

During that brief pause a door opened; and as once the Divine presence
was revealed at Belshazzar's feast, so now it seemed to be manifest
in the apparition of an old white-haired servant, who tottered in,
and looked sadly from under knitted brows at the revelers. He gave
a withering glance at the garlands, the golden cups, the pyramids of
fruit, the dazzling lights of the banquet, the flushed scared faces, the
hues of the cushions pressed by the white arms of the women.

"My lord, your father is dying!" he said; and at those solemn words,
uttered in hollow tones, a veil of crape seemed to be drawn over the
wild mirth.

Don Juan rose to his feet with a gesture to his guests that might be
rendered by, "Excuse me; this kind of thing does not happen every day."

Does it so seldom happen that a father's death surprises youth in the
full-blown splendor of life, in the midst