Her power is shown in the moving of her solicitors to think, instantly after they have made their cast, that the reverse of it was what they intended. It comes as though she had withdrawn the bandage from her forehead and dropped a leaden glance on them, like a great dame angry to have her signal misinterpreted. Well, then, distinguished by the goddess in such a manner, we have it proved to us how she wished to favour: for the reverse wins, and we who are pinched blame not her cruelty but our blind folly. This is true worship. Henceforth the pain of her nip is mingled with the dream of her kiss; between the positive and the imagined of her we remain confused until the purse is an empty body on a gallows, honour too, perhaps. Captain Abrane was one of the Countess Livia’s numerous courtiers on the border of the promenade under the lighted saloons. A colossus inactive, he had little to say among the chattering circle; for when seated, cards were wanted to animate him: and he looked entirely out of place and unfitted, like a great vessel’s figure-head in a shipwright’s yard. She murmured: ‘Not this evening?’ Abrane quoted promptly a line of nursery song ‘How shall he cut it without e’er a knife?’ ‘Have we run it down so low?’ said she, with no reproach in her tone. The captain shrugged over his clean abyss, where nothing was. Yesterday their bank presented matronly proportions. But an importuned goddess reduces the most voluminous to bare stitches within a few winks of an eye. Livia turned to a French gentleman of her court, M. de St. Ombre, and pursued a conversation. He was a stately cavalier of the Gallicized Frankish outlines, ready, but grave in his bearing, grave in his delivery, trimly moustached, with a Guise beard. His profound internal question relating to this un-English beauty of the British Isles:--had she no passion in her nature? was not convinced by her apparent insensibility to Fortune’s whips. Sir Meeson Corby inserted a word of Bull French out of place from time to time. As it might be necessary to lean on the little man for weapons of war, supposing Lord Fleetwood delayed his arrival yet another day, Livia was indulgent. She assisted him to think that he spoke the foreign tongue. Mention of Lord Fleetwood set Sir Meeson harping again on his alarms, in consideration of the vagabond object of the young lord had roamed away with. ‘You forget that Russett has gypsy in him: Welsh! it’s about the same,’ said Livia. ‘He can take excellent care of himself and his purse.’ ‘Countess, he is a good six days overdue.’ ‘He will be in time for the ball at the Schloss.’ Sir Meeson Corby produced an aspect of the word ‘if,’ so perkily, that the dejected Captain Abrane laughed outright and gave him double reason to fret for Lord Fleetwood’s arrival, by saying: ‘If he hangs off much longer, I shall have to come on you for another fifty.’