"Pshaw! I'll make Carmen a sugar man in my image. She'll like that lots better. I love only you--only you, you beautiful, golden, tormenting angel of a girl! If you hadn't kept me on pins and needles, I wouldn't say it! I love _you_, I say. How could any man in his senses ever love any other woman after once seeing you?" Gwendolen tried to be stern. "No," she said again, "you don't love, you don't respect me. You were horrid that day! You defied me to my face. You wouldn't apologize. Will you apologize now?" "Indeed I won't," he cried with a ring of victory. "I'd be a mucker and a sneak to do so, and you would never want to look at me again. Deny it,--and deny that you love me,--oh, Gwendolen, Gwendolen!" With a little sob, in which a golden feather had been caught, she leaned to his arms. He took up the little brown sealskin cap, flung it back to her head, and, in his most boyish, impudent, and ecstatic tone, said in her ear, "You know the penalty for wearing another fellow's hat?" CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN In his favorite small smoking-room at the French Legation, crammed with motley Japanese and Gallic bric-a-brac, Count Ronsard fumbled nervously with his nether-lip. "You sent for me, your Excellency?" said the secretary Mouquin, at the door. "Allons! Entrez! It is the devil!--what our English cousins call 'the beastly bore.' But for his mother, the Princess Olga, I would wash my hands entirely!" He went through the gesture, revolving one fat pudding of a fist about the other, and closing with an outward fling of both, and a shrug that made his body quake. "No news at all, Mouquin?" "Nothing decisive, your Excellency. A mere hint, a hushed rumor, that Le Beau was last traced to the neighborhood of Prince Hagané's official residence." "Sacrebleu! You should have probed." "I asked a few questions guardedly. Your Excellency, one hesitates to put a match to a powder-train." "Quite true, Mouquin. And when did the hushed rumor have it that he was seen,--what hour?" "Before noon,--not long, in fact, after his mysterious escape from the nurses." Ronsard's head dropped forward an inch. A sickly glow drove the usual gray pallor from his face. "Doubtless," ventured the secretary, "Monsieur Le Beau will find his way sooner or later--to you!" "Certainement! Certainement!" cried the other, finding relief in sarcasm. "He will come weeping to the arms of Mother France. Bah! I would that Mother France could greet him with the toes of these boots!" He thrust forward pointed patent-leather tips, and stared at them, as if calculating the punishment they might inflict. Mouquin, not being asked to find a seat, still stood by the door. The very air of the room held in solution, with its blue smoke, the dampness of foreboding. The first secretary's voice sounded thin. "The doctors think this mad exposure means his certain death, your Excellency."