rden. "Is that not Zara coming now?" he asked. "Look, your eyes are
better than mine."

Barrat rose quickly, and the two men walked forward, and bowed with
the easy courtesy of old comrades to a tall, fair girl who came
hurriedly up the steps. The Countess Zara was a young woman, but one
who had stood so long on guard against the world, that the strain had
told, and her eyes were hard and untrustful, so that she looked much
older than she really was. Her life was of two parts. There was
little to be told of the first part; she was an English girl who had
come from a manufacturing town to study art and live alone in Paris,
where she had been too indolent to work, and too brilliant to remain
long without companions eager for her society. Through them and the
stories of her wit and her beauty, she had come to know the King of
Messina, and with that meeting the second part of her life began; for
she had found something so attractive, either in his title or in the
cynical humor of the man himself, that for the last two years she had
followed his fortunes, and Miss Muriel Winter, art student, had become
the Countess Zara, and an uncrowned queen. She was beautiful, with
great masses of yellow hair and wonderful brown eyes. Her manner when
she spoke seemed to show that she despised the world and those in it
almost as thoroughly as she despised herself.

On the morning of her return from Messina, she wore a blue serge
yachting suit with a golf cloak hanging from her shoulders, and as she
crossed the terrace she pulled nervously at her gloves and held out her
hand covered with jewels to each of the two men.

"I bring good news," she said, with an excited laugh. "Where is Louis?"

"I will tell his Majesty that you have come. You are most welcome,"
the Baron answered.

But as he turned to the door it opened from the inside and the king
came toward them, shivering and blinking his eyes in the bright
sunlight. It showed the wrinkles and creases around his mouth and the
blue veins under the mottled skin, and the tiny lines at the corners of
his little bloodshot eyes that marked the pace at which he had lived as
truthfully as the rings on a tree-trunk tell of its quiet growth.

He caught up his long dressing-gown across his chest as though it were
a mantle, and with a quick glance to see that there were no other
witnesses to his deshabille, bent and kissed the woman's hand, and
taking it in his own stroked it gently.