Among those who looked up as Prince Tchernigow passed was Lord Dollamore, who was seated at one of the tables, with no companion save his invariable one--his stick. Dollamore generally came to Baden every year. The place amused him; it was a grand field for the display of the worst passions of human nature,--a study which always afforded him infinite delight. He never played, but he was constantly hovering round the tables; and there was scarcely an incident which happened in the seething crowd, scarcely a change which swept across the faces of the leading actors, that passed unnoticed by him. He did not dance; he would have been prevented by his lameness from indulging in such a pastime, even had his taste impelled him to it; but he was a constant attendant at the balls which M. Benazet provided for the amusement of his patrons; and looking on at the actual life before him as he might have looked on the mimic life of a theatrical representation, he had innumerable conferences with his stick on all he saw and heard, and on the arguments which he deduced therefrom. He immensely enjoyed being seated, as he was then, in the calm autumnal moonlit evening, with a cup of excellent coffee by his side, a cigar in his mouth, and the ever-shifting panorama of human faces passing before him. "That Tchernigow is really delicious!" he said to himself--or to his stick--as he looked after the Russian, and marked the excitement which he created; "there's a savage insolence about him which is positively refreshing in these days of bowing and scraping and preposterous politeness. How they chatter, and gape, and nudge each other with their elbows about him! and what a supreme indifference he affects to it all! Affects? Yes, _mon prince_, it is accepted as the real thing by these good people, but we are not to be taken in by veneer, _nous autres!_ It would require a very small scratch indeed to pick off the Petersburg-cum-Paris polish, and to arrive at the genuine Calmuck substratum. Only to look at you to tell that Nature's handwriting never lies; and if ever there were a more delightfully truculent, ruffianly, bloodthirsty savage than yourself, _mon prince_, I am very much out in my ideas. God help the woman on whom you ever get a legitimate hold! Ah, that reminds me--what has become of the widow? There is no doubt that Tchernigow was badly hit in London. The only man received at her house, the only man permitted to assuage her grief, to wipe away those tears which doubtless flowed so constantly for poor Percy Hammond! What an audacious little devil it is! How pluckily she fought that business of guardianship to the child; and how gracefully she retired from the contest when she saw that she had no chance, and that defeat was inevitable! She's the cleverest woman, in a certain way, that I've ever met with; and I'd take my oath she's playing some long-headed, far-sighted game now, and that Tchernigow is the stake.