Without giving the matter any consideration, Wat ordered a bottle of old Rhenish, and sat back to contemplate the scene at his ease. Officers of every regiment in the services of the States-General and of its allies were there, young attachés of the embassies, stray princelings of the allied German duchies; while scattered among these were to be seen a parti-colored crowd of ladies with flower-decked hair, lavish of shoulder, opulent of charm. Presently the pretty maid brought Wat his bottle of Rhenish, ancient and cobwebbed. She decanted it carefully, standing close by his shoulder, so that a subtle suggestion of feminine proximity affected the young man strangely. She poured out a full measure of the scented vintage into a huge green glass on which tritons gambolled and sea-nymphs writhed. "You have, perchance, no one to drink with you?" she said, giving him a glance out of her large and lustrous eyes. "Truly," replied Wat, "I am alone!" And the sadness of his life seemed to culminate in a kind of mimic and desperate isolation as he spoke. "Then," said the girl, "may I not drink first to your beautiful eyes, my captain, and then, if you will, to our better acquaintance?" She lifted the glass to her lips, tasted it as a bird does, and presented it to Walter with the daintiest gesture. "Your name?" he said, looking at her with a certain tolerant and almost passive interest. "I am called 'the Little Marie!'" she smiled; "I have been wellnigh a week in the Hostel of the Coronation, and not yet have I seen any to compare with you, my lord captain of the fair locks." With a certain childish abandon, and a freedom still more than half innocent, Marie seated herself upon the arm of the great chair into which Wat had thrown himself upon his entrance. Her dainty foot dangled over the carven finial, almost touching the ribbons at Walter's knee with its silver buckled slipper of the mode of Paris. Marie's hand rested lightly on the small curls at the back of his neck, till Walter grew vaguely restive under the caressing fingers. Yet because he was in a great and thronged room humming with company, where none took any notice of him or his companion, each being intent on playing out his own game, the uneasy feeling soon passed away. Only now and again, as the Rhenish sank in the bottle and the hand of the Little Marie took wider sweeps and paused more caressingly among his blonde hair, a thought awoke not unpleasantly in Wat's bosom. "They have cast me out of their home and friendship. They have preferred a traitor. But I will let them see that there is pleasure in the world yet." And his arm went of its own accord about the waist of the Little Marie. * * * * *