er
beautiful neck and shoulders, her hair dressed close to her head, her
air of quiet, almost singular distinction.

"The young lady," she confessed, "wears her clothes well for an English
woman. She is _bien soignee_, but she looks a little difficult."

His eyes followed the direction of hers, and her object was achieved.
She read correctly the light that gleamed in them.

"I may come to-night?" she asked quietly.

He shook his head.

"Not again," he replied.

A violinist now held the stage, a Pole newly come to London. La Belle
Nita closed her eyes. For a few minutes her sorrow seemed to throb to
the minor music to which she was listening.

"For all my work, then," she said presently, "for the suffering and the
risk, there is to be nothing?"

"Is it nothing for you to be invited to live in whatsoever manner you
choose?" he remonstrated.

"It is little," she replied steadily. "There are a dozen who would do
this for me, who pray every day that they may do so. What are all these
things beside the love of my master?"

He looked at her a little sadly, yet without any sign of real feeling.
To him she represented nothing more than a doll with brains, from whose
intelligence he had profited, but of whose beauty he was weary.

"You know what our poet says, Nita," he reminded her. "'Love is like the
rustling of the wind in the almond trees before dawn.' We cannot command
it. It comes to us or leaves us without reason."

She looked across the auditorium once more and spoke with her head
turned away from her companion.

"There is no one in the East," she said, "because those who write me
weekly send news of my lord's doings. There is no one in the East,
because there they give the body who know nothing of the soul. And so my
Prince is safe amongst them. But here--these western women have other
gifts. Is that she, master of my life and soul?"

"I met her this evening for the first time," he replied.

She laughed drearily.

"Eyes may meet in the street without speech, a glance may burn its way
into the soul. Once I thought that I might love again, because a
stranger smiled at me in the Bois, and he had grey eyes, and that look
about his mouth which a woman craves for. He passed on, and I forgot.
You see, my lord was still there.--So this is the woman."

"Who knows?" he answered.

Immelan came into the box a little abruptly. There was a cloud upon his
face which he did his best to conceal. Almost simultaneous