s--what has been is not. And the first reason
now-a-days why a thing should no longer be, is the fact that once it
was!'

Valerie was almost as tall as the Duke himself, and she looked level
into his weary eyes.

'Have we changed with the world, sire?'

'Not--yet,' replied the Duke bitterly; then, struck, as it seemed, by
the intrinsic spirit of the young imperial face gazing into his own, he
added, 'Though you tempt a man to believe in you, Mademoiselle!'

'I say this before your Highness and these gentlemen of your Guard,'
Valerie said, her eyes flashing. 'May the Selpdorf, who ceases to be
true to your Highness and to Maasau, die!'

In after time events brought back the vehement words to the minds of the
three who heard them.

'And I say, "Amen!"' The Duke took her hand and added, 'Which proves,
Valerie, that you have conquered your old friend, Gustave of Maasau.
Come, Captain Rallywood, half-an-hour's play, and then to bed.'

Valerie looked up at Unziar as she walked beside him.

'And yet you would not believe me?'

'Come!' was Unziar's reply.

She laid her hand within his arm and passed silently through the
reception rooms beside him.

She felt that the time had come when Unziar could no more be put off by
the little wiles and evasions a woman employs who has nothing to give to
the man who loves her but a definite answer. Two luxurious chairs stood
ready for occupants in the nook to which he led her, but he had no
thought to give to conventionalities. He stood before her keen and
white, and desperate with doubt.

'Valerie, what does all this mean?'

Though only a girl in years, Valerie was a woman in experience.
Experience, not gained altogether at first hand, be it understood, but
such as a clever woman easily gathers from the lives of those about her.
As the motherless daughter of M. Selpdorf, she had had exceptional
opportunities. Thrown into the midst of a brilliant but vicious society,
her eyes had seen more of the bare under-texture of life than was
perhaps desirable; she had looked upon the shift and drift of things
political with an ever-present knowledge that there danger lurked and
waited; she had learned the uses of reserve, and something of the art of
resource; and, above all, her womanly perceptions had taken on a strange
edge of sensitive power, due to her father's quaint methods of pointing
out to her the difference between the seeming and the true. By reason of
this premature insigh