; one could divine her slender and graceful, under the
voluminous folds of her domino.

She moved a little away from the door, deeper into the conservatory. The
mandarin kept beside her. There, amongst the palms, a _fontaine
lumineuse_ was playing, rhythmically changing colour. Now it was a
shower of rubies; now of emeralds or amethysts, of sapphires, topazes,
or opals.

"How pretty," she said, "and how frightfully ingenious. I am wondering
whether this wouldn't be a good place to sit down. What do _you_ think?"
And she pointed with a fan to a rustic bench.

So they sat down on the rustic bench, by the _fontaine lumineuse_.

"In view of your fear that you're not Mr. Field, it's rather a
coincidence that at a masked ball in Vienna you should just happen to be
English, isn't it?" she asked.

"Oh, everybody's more or less English, in these days, you know," said
he.

"There's some truth in that," she admitted, with a laugh. "What a
diverting piece of artifice this Wintergarten is, to be sure. Fancy
arranging the electric lights to shine through a dome of purple glass,
and look like stars. They do look like stars, don't they? Slightly
overdressed, showy stars, indeed; stars in the German taste; but stars,
all the same. Then, by day, you know, the purple glass is removed, and
you get the sun--the real sun. Do you notice the delicious fragrance of
lilac? If one hadn't too exacting an imagination, one might almost
persuade oneself that one was in a proper open-air garden, on a night in
May--Yes, everybody is more or less English, in these days. That's
precisely the sort of thing I should have expected Victor Field to
say."

"By-the-bye," questioned the mandarin, "if you don't mind increasing my
stores of knowledge, who _is_ this fellow Field?"

"This fellow Field? Ah, who indeed?" said she. "That's just what I wish
you'd tell me."

"I'll tell you with pleasure, after you've supplied me with the
necessary data," he promised cheerfully.

"Well, by some accounts, he's a little literary man in London," she
remarked.

"Oh, come! You never imagined that I was a little literary man in
London," protested he.

"You might be worse," she retorted. "However, if the phrase offends you,
I'll say a rising young literary man, instead. He writes things, you
know."

"Poor chap, does he? But then, that's a way they have, sizing up
literary persons?" His tone was interrogative.

"Doubtless," she agreed. "Poems and stories and t