When the contemplation of the foot lost interest, the young woman—for she was hardly more than twenty-three—would draw from its hiding-place behind the rose-colored velvet loveknot a medallion set in brilliants attached to a slender gold chain of exquisite workmanship, whose fine thread fell upon her delicate shoulders from the necklace of spinel rubies which embraced her swan’s throat like linked pomegranate seeds or tiny drops of transparent blood. An East Indian screen with numerous painted silk panels framed in ebony, stood in fantastic zigzags behind the divan, and the thick, blue-flowered damask curtains of the shuttered casements had been carefully drawn; nevertheless she shivered now and then and pulled up about her arms her yellow scarf of Canton crepe heavy with silk embroidery and fringe. Wax candelabra in silver-gilt were reflected from the paneled mirrors and in the shining floor of polished rosewood, pervading the apartment with a light at once soft and lustrous. Just above the mantelpiece, dominating the entire _mise en scène_, hung an oil painting, a portrait by Copley of the master and mistress of the mansion. The lady in becoming a Grantham could not forget that she had been a Vizard, and therefore closely related to the last of the Royal Governors of the Province. The two figures were represented seated at a table engaged in a game of chess, the position of the pieces indicating a decided “check” on the part of the lady, whose haughty countenance appeared somewhat flushed with anticipated victory. The motive of the composition had evidently been at her suggestion, for her husband’s face expressed polite resignation either to superiority of skill or the triumph of accidental good fortune, giving him a position of secondary importance more or less unmerited. His daughter-in-law half asleep before the fire, glanced up at the two figures for the hundredth time and yawned as one—even a pretty woman—yawns in the freedom of solitude: that is to say, open-mouthed. The tap, tap of a cane came across the desert of waxed rosewood. “My dear Nadège, I sympathize most cordially with you,” said a voice at the young woman’s elbow. Nadège turned her ruddy head languidly and opened her sleepy grey eyes upon the fantastic figure before them. “Why do you sympathize with me, my dear cousin?” she inquired. Her English was perfect, with, perhaps, a slight foreign precision rather than accent. The dear cousin sat down upon the divan beside her. She was an ancient dame whose much wrinkled face, surmounted by the mingled purple and yellow dyes of an extraordinary turban, was still alive with a pair of malicious, sparkling black eyes. She grasped a tall cane at arm’s length in her skinny left hand, confronted the yawning beauty sharply, pressing a pointed forefinger of her equally skinny right claw upon the middle of the loveknot.