*

It was eleven o'clock on that night of nights; and the bed and dressing
rooms of the Princess Sophia were lighted to suffocation with smoking
candles. Two maids and old Masha, general factotum of her mistress, were
bustling importantly from one room to the other, bearing to her, piece
by piece, their mistress's burden of jewels. At her dressing-table,
pale, still wearing, as always in public, her mask of emotionless
impenetrability, sat Sophia. Her neck and shoulders, which, according to
the rigid etiquette of court-dress, were fully exposed, were white, and,
considering her extreme slenderness, surprisingly round. A broad collar
of sapphires and diamonds clasped above an Oriental necklace of pearls,
successfully hid whatever there was to betray the too-visible marks of
the "certain" age. On her head she bore the oddly becoming kakoshnik,
which, in her case, was set with a triple row of superb diamonds. The
face below this gleaming structure, the delicate, weary face, robbed of
its customary frame of smoothly banded yellow hair, looked more sharply
pointed than usual, but surprisingly pretty. For there was actually a
fire--whether of pleasure, expectancy or nervousness--in her gray eyes;
and there had come a delicate flush to the usually pallid cheeks. Sophia
was, indeed, living with her dead to-night. Dreams of the old days held
her in a kind of spell. The woman of memories--memories of a brief
youth, a swiftly blighted flowering of life--had for once been forced
back to a forgotten theme. And she found, recalling the days of her
first balls, that the customary bitterness of contrast had suddenly
disappeared. There was much that was new in this present situation: she
was alive to sensations unfelt for years. There stirred in her heart
what she was only to define after it had gone again: that which for most
people forms the great staff of the inner life: on which she had been so
long unaccustomed to lean--the great Phoenix, Hope.

At length they had fastened the last pin in her veil, the last hook in
the heavy gown of cloth of silver. The maids stood off from her a
little, whispering. But she herself remained motionless, gazing absently
into her quaintly framed old mirror, lost in one of those reveries that
her servants had learned not to disturb. The pause had lasted some five
minutes when the door opening into the outer hall opened, vigorously,
and the Princess started suddenly up, her face changing pathetically,