The next day found Bellaviste society divided into two parties, one of which accepted Madame O’Malachy’s account of the events of the evening before, and believed that an insane pride had driven Nadia to refuse the King; while the other, led by Madame Sertchaieff, and relying on the authority of M. Drakovics, held that his Majesty had, more or less directly, declined to marry her. Madame Sertchaieff was the great lady of Bellaviste. As the wife of the Minister for War (the brother of the Ivan Sertchaieff who had been the last Premier of the late king), she took the lead in the society of the city, and derived no small honour from the fact that her husband was the only member of the Ministry whom M. Drakovics treated on anything approaching a footing of equality. With every desire to make the Thracian army invincible, the Premier was handicapped by an absolute ignorance of military affairs, and since General Sertchaieff had turned his back on his brother and his party to adopt the cause of the revolution, he left all the actual work of the bureau in his hands, and also consulted him frequently on the general policy of the Government. Consequently, when Madame Sertchaieff (it is needless to say that she had not been among the ladies whose eagerness to see Nadia had so deeply scandalised the Premier) averred that she had guessed, from the excitement visible in the King’s manner when he danced with her, that he was screwing up his courage to the point of formally breaking off his relations with Miss O’Malachy, and further hinted that the step had been taken on the advice and with the full approval of M. Drakovics, she carried many of her hearers with her. Curiosity was rife as to what would be the next step on either side; but on the evening after the ball the public excitement was cruelly balked by the news that the O’Malachy family, with the exception of Louis, had left the city. They were gone because it could not but be disagreeable to Miss O’Malachy to run the risk of meeting her rejected lover at every turn, said Mr Hicks and his party; because they had received a secret mandate from the police advising them to depart, said Madame Sertchaieff and her friends; because the O’Malachy and his wife, perceiving that there was no opening in Thracia for their peculiar talents, had determined to return to the service of their Scythian employers, thought Cyril.