The ball spun round again, and this time it was the black. Baroness Ely picked up her fan and her empty purse, and rose. In the movement of the crowd, while he was endeavoring to extricate himself in order to reach her, Corancez suddenly noticed that he had lost Hautefeuille. "The awkwardness of that innocent boy," he murmured, while waiting for Madame de Carlsberg. If the vanity of speaking to the wife--even morganatic--of an archduke of Austria had not absorbed him at this moment, he might have observed his companion making his way to the purchaser of the jewel so fantastically sold. And perhaps he would have found the bargain very clever which was made with this innocent boy, had he seen him take from his pocket-book two bank-notes and receive from the usurer the case which had a few moments ago sparkled on the table before the Baroness. The usurer had sold the jewel to the lover for twice the sum that he had paid. Such is the beginning of great business houses. CHAPTER II THE CRY OF A SOUL If Pierre Hautefeuille's action had escaped the malicious eyes of Corancez, it had not, however, passed unperceived. Another person had seen the Baroness Ely sell the gold box, and the young man buy it; and this person was one whom the unfortunate lover should have most feared. For to be seen by her was to be seen by Madame de Carlsberg herself, as the witness of the two successive sales was no other than Madame Brion, the confidante of Baroness Ely, residing at the same villa, and sure to report what she had seen. But to explain the singular interest with which Madame Brion had observed these two scenes, and the attitude with which she was about to speak of it to her friend, it is necessary to relate the circumstances that had caused so close an intimacy between the wife of a Parisian financier of such low birth as Horace Brion, and a noble lady of the European Olympus, who figured in the Almanach de Gotha among the Imperial family of Austria. The peculiarity of the cosmopolitan world, the trait that gives it its psychological picturesqueness, in spite of the banal character inevitable to a society composed of the rich and the idle, is the constant surprises of connections like this. This society serves as the point of intersection for destinies that have started from the widest extremities of the social world. One may see there the interplay of natures so dissimilar, often so hostile, that their simplest emotions have a savor of strangeness, the poetry of unfamiliar things. Just as the love of Pierre Hautefeuille, this Frenchman so profoundly, so completely French, for a foreigner so charming as the Baroness Ely, with a charm so novel, so difficult for the young man to analyze, was destined to occupy a place of such importance in his sentimental life, so the friendship between the Baroness Ely and Louise Brion could not fail to be a thing of special and peculiar value in their lives, although its material