Now Bernadine was a man of easy manners and unruffled composure. To the natural _insouciance_ of his aristocratic bringing-up he had added the steely reserve of a man moving in the large world, engaged more often than not in some hazardous enterprise. Yet, for once in his life, and in the midst of the idlest of conversations, he gave himself away so utterly that even this woman with whom he was lunching--a very butterfly lady indeed--could not fail to perceive it. She looked at him in something like astonishment. Without the slightest warning his face had become set in a rigid stare, his eyes were filled with the expression of a man who sees into another world. The healthy colour faded from his cheeks; he was white even to the parted lips; the wine dripped from his raised glass on to the tablecloth. "Why, whatever is the matter with you?" she demanded. "Is it a ghost that you see?" Bernadine's effort was superb, but he was too clever to deny the shock. "A ghost indeed," he answered, "the ghost of a man whom every newspaper in Europe has declared to be dead." Her eyes followed his. The two people who were being ushered to a seat in their immediate vicinity were certainly of somewhat unusual appearance. The man was tall and thin as a lath, and he wore the clothes of the fashionable world without awkwardness, and yet with the air of one who was wholly unaccustomed to them. His cheek-bones were remarkably high, and receded so quickly towards his pointed chin that his cheeks were little more than hollows. His eyes were dry and burning, flashing here and there, as though the man himself were continually oppressed by some furtive fear. His thick black hair was short-cropped, his forehead high and intellectual. He was a strange figure indeed in such a gathering, and his companion only served to accentuate the anachronisms of his appearance. She was, above all things, a woman of the moment--fair, almost florid, a little thick-set, with tightly laced yet passable figure. Her eyes were blue, her hair light-coloured. She wore magnificent furs, and as she threw aside her boa she disclosed a mass of jewellery around her neck and upon her bosom, almost barbaric in its profusion and setting. "What an extraordinary couple!" Lady Maxwell whispered. Bernadine smiled. "The man looks as though he had stepped out of the Old Testament," he murmured.