It was five o'clock when we reached its Reidenscher Hof, nine when we had finished dinner. It was stupid work yawning over coffee and _Galignani_. What was to be done? Maréchale proposed the Opera, and for the first time in his life was unopposed by his wife. Constance was in a suave, benignant mood; she was thinking of her Graf von Rosenläu, of the Pullingers, and of the sweet, adroit manner in which she would--when she had captivated him and could proffer such hints--awaken his Serene Highness to a sense of his moral guilt in not bringing to instant capital punishment every agent in those Satanus-farmed banks that throve throughout his duchy. Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Protocol assented, and to the little miniature gayly-decorated Opera House we drove. They were in the middle of the second act of "Ernani." "Ernani" was stale to us all, and we naturally lorgné'd the boxes in lieu of the stage. I had turned my glass on the left-hand stage-box, and was going steadily round, when a faint cry of dismay, alarm, amazement, horror, broke, muffled and low, from mesdames mes soeurs. Their lorgnons were riveted on one spot; their cheeks were blanched; their hands were tremulous; if they had beheld a spiritual visitant, no consternation more profound, more intense, could have seized both with its iron hand. _My_ sisters too! the chilliest, the calmest, the most impenetrable, the most unassailable of mortals! "And we called her, in her hearing, not a proper person?" gasped Lady Maréchale. "We thought her a lorette! an intrigante! a dame d'industrie!" echoed Mrs. Protocol. "Who wore paste jewels!" "Who came from the Rue Bréda!" "Who wanted to know us!" "Whom we wouldn't know!" I turned my Voightlander where their Voightlanders turned; there, in the royal box, leaning back in the fauteuil that marked her rank, there, with her lovely hazel eyes, her witching smile, her radiant beauty, matchless as the pearls gleaming above her brow, there sat the "adventuress--or worse!" of Vicq d'Azyr; the "evidently a not proper person" of my discerning sisters--H.S.H. Princess Hélène, Grand-Duchess of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz! Great Heavens! how had we never guessed her before? How had we never divined her identity? How had we never remembered all we had heard of her love of laisser-aller, her taste for adventure, her delight in travelling, when she could, unattended and incognita? How had we never put this and that together, and penetrated the metamorphosis?