part,
I believe the good God must think twice before sending one born of such
parents to the nether regions."

CHAPTER VII

A PRINCESS OF MYSTERY

In the spring of the year 1772 the fashionable world of Paris was full
of speculation and gossip about a stranger, as mysterious as she was
beautiful, who had appeared from no one knew where, in its midst, and
who called herself the Princess Aly Emettee de Vlodimir. That she was a
woman of rank and distinction admitted of no question. Her queenly
carriage and the graciousness and dignity of her deportment were in
keeping with the Royal character she assumed; but more remarkable than
these evidences of high station was her beauty, which in its brilliance
eclipsed that of the fairest women of Versailles and the Tuileries.

Tall, with a figure of exquisite modelling and grace, her daintily
poised head crowned with a coronal of golden-brown hair, with a face of
perfect oval, dimpled cheeks as delicately tinted as a rose, her chief
glory lay in her eyes, large and lustrous, which had the singular
quality of changing colour--"now blue, now black, which gave to their
dreamy expression a peculiar, mysterious air."

Who was she, this woman of beauty and mystery? It was rumoured that she
was a Circassian Princess, "the heroine of strange romances." She was
living luxuriously in a fine house in the most fashionable quarter of
Paris, in company with two German "Barons"--one, the Baron von Embs, who
claimed to be her cousin; the other, Baron von Schenk, who appeared to
play the role of guardian. To her _salon_ in the Ile St Louis were
flocking many of the greatest men in France, infatuated by her beauty,
and paying homage to her charms. To a man, they adored the mysterious
lady--from Prince Ojinski and other illustrious refugees from Poland to
the Comte de Rochefort-Velcourt, the Duke of Limburg's representative at
the French Court, and the wealthy old _beau_ M. de Marine, who, it was
said, placed his long purse at her disposal.

But while the men were thus her slaves, the women tossed their heads
contemptuously at their dangerous rival. She was an adventuress, they
declared with one voice; and great was their satisfaction when, one day,
news came that the Baron von Embs had been arrested for debt and that,
on investigation, he proved to be no Baron at all, but the
good-for-nothing son of a Ghent tradesman.

The "bubble" had soon burst, and the attentions of the police be