mother's sake."

"For my mother's sake--?"

"What the Lone Wolf was in his day, your mother was in hers--the most
brilliant adventuress Europe ever knew."

"Oh!" cried the girl in semi-hysterical protest. "Oh, no, no! Impossible!"

"I assure you, it is quite true. Some day I may tell you her history--and
mine. For the present, you will do well to think no more about what I have
confessed. Repining can never mend the past. It is to-day and to-morrow you
must think of: that you are restored to me, and that I have not only the
means but a great hunger to make you happy, to gratify your slightest
whim."

"I want nothing!" Sofia insisted, wildly.

"You want sleep," Prince Victor corrected, fondly--"you want it badly. You
are nervous, overstrung, in no condition to understand the great good
fortune that has befallen you. But to-morrow you will see things in a
rosier light."

Apparently he had manipulated some signal unremarked by Sofia. The door
opened, framing the figure of the man Nogam. Without looking round, but
with an inscrutable smile, Prince Victor took the girl in his arms again
and held her close.

"You rang, sir?"

"Oh, are you there, Nogam? Is the apartment ready for the Princess Sofia?"

"Quite ready, sir."

"Be good enough to conduct her to it." Again Prince Victor kissed Sofia's
forehead, then let her go. "Good-night, my child."

Moving slowly toward the door, drooping, Sofia made inarticulate response.
She felt suddenly stupefied with fatigue. To think meant an effort that
mocked her flagging powers. A vast lassitude was weighing upon her, body
and spirit were faint in the enervation of an inexorable disconsolation.

VI

THE MUMMER

Alone with his secretary, Prince Victor Vassilyevski dropped indifferently
the guise of manner with which he had clothed himself for the benefit of
the woman whom he claimed as his own child. That semblance of shy affection
coloured by regrets for the past and modified by the native nobility of a
prince in exile--so becoming in a parent to whose bosom a daughter whom he
had never seen was suddenly restored--being of no more service for the
present, was incontinently discarded. In its stead Victor favoured Karslake
with a slow smile of understanding that broadened into an insuppressible
grin of successful malice, a grimace of crude exultation through which
peered out the impish savage mutinously imprisoned within a flimsy husk of
modern manner.

Suspectin