What a beautiful, frivolous, gracious creature she seemed in Lavendale's eyes as she walked by his side, moving with swift footsteps through the cold night! She carried herself superbly at all times, and walked like Dian or Atalanta. Sir Robert himself had praised her carriage, and talked of her as "a splendid mover," as if she had been one of his Norfolk hunters. She wore her mask still, and her head was muffled in her Turkish "asmack," and her long furred mantle reached to her heels. Yet there was hardly a man at the Court end of London who would have failed to recognise the lady whom a legion of admirers at White's and at the Cocoa Tree toasted as a queen among women, and whose name had been written with a diamond on one of the toast-glasses at the Kit-Kat Club when she was fifteen. "Tell me some of your Eastern adventures," she exclaimed presently. "I have been telling you all about our town scandals, and you have told me positively nothing of your travels. Is it true that you broke into the seraglio at Constantinople, and were set upon by a dozen blackamoors as big as Juba, and very nearly killed in the scuffle?" "Just about as true as the most startling adventures of Marco Polo or Sir John Mandeville. I saw no more of the seraglio than the cypress-tops in the garden that surround it, and a glimpse of the palace itself through the foliage." "But is it not true that you brought home a Circassian slave, a peerless beauty, and that you have her under lock and key at Lavendale Manor?" "That also belongs to the Marco Polo order of adventures. No, Lady Judith, the burnt-out ashes of a heart are not to be rekindled by almond-eyed beauties with thick waists and squabby figures; I saw nothing in the East half so lovely as that which I left in the West." "And yet we are taught to think the Orient is full of loveliness. Here we are at my door. Will you come in and wait for Mr. Topsparkle? I daresay I shall have company, for I told half a dozen of my dearest friends they might take their chocolate with me after the masquerade." The Soho Square of 1726 was a place of palaces, but its fashion was already waning. Monmouth House, a royal mansion built by Wren for the luckless Duke, had fallen from Lord Bateman's occupation to a public auction-room; and there were other signs of decay which indicated that Golden Square to the south, and the newly planned Cavendish Square, almost in the country, were disputing the palm with Soho, which was beginning to assume a dilapidated air; like old Lady Orkney, or any other famous Court beauty of a bygone generation. Mr. Topsparkle's house was the largest and most regal-looking after Monmouth House. It was approached by a double flight of steps, and its pilastered balconies, pedimented windows, and Grecian cornice gave a stately air to a building which in spaciousness and elevation was magnificent.