Altogether Master Guy Stanhope Chester is very well pleased with himself, as he sits down and makes short work of the repast in front of him, pouring down the wine of Xeres into his benumbed frame from a huge silver drinking beaker, and finding himself silently and deftly waited upon by the man servant. Thinking to discover more of the lady he has rescued, Chester suggests to the lackey, “A fine fête your mistress gives this night!” “Yes!” answers the servitor, proud of the grandeur of his house. “We have for the entertainment of our guests, rederykers from Ghent who will give us declamation and farce, two gipsy girls imported from Andalusia, our own court fool to make us merry, also the daughter of the ex-burgomaster, who will dance for us in her father’s highest-priced silks. I shall contrive to get into the hall to see her prance; the Flemish wench has very pretty ankles, and the airs of a countess,” guffaws the fellow. But he says naught of the lady of the barge, and, the meal being finished, the table is cleared by several flunkies in gorgeous liveries, the resources of the house being apparently princely. “Odds doubloons!” soliloquizes the young man, watching the last of the lackeys disappear. “The Countess de Mansfeld’s hospitality is very taking!” Then a sudden coldness flies through his veins, in spite of the generous wine, as he remembers that he is eating the salt of the Spaniard in the Citadel of Antwerp. But now suddenly the cold jumps from his body; he springs up with a start, his eyes gazing for one moment in rapture and admiration, and the next in a kind of dazed surprise, his hand seeking his breast feeling something beneath his satin doublet as if to be sure that it is really there. For a girlish form of wondrous beauty and grace, with the fair skin and deep, lustrous, languid, but vivacious eyes, peculiar to the purest blood and highest loveliness of Castile, arrayed in evening dress, of velvet court train and shimmering silk and lace stomacher, that shows ivory shoulders and arms, stands before him, and the soft voice that has charmed him all this night in a mixture of coquetry and shyness says: “I thought you might like to see the face of her whom to-night you saved from the Dutch pirates!” Then she laughs lightly and murmurs: “If they had only known who I was I suppose the Flemish outlaws would have cut my throat,” giving a little gesture across the white ivory column that supports her lovely head, “before even you could have recaptured me.” “Who under heaven can she be?” gasps Guy to himself, clutching again at his bosom. “She is the lady of the miniature, but who—WHO?” But surprise and admiration are not all on his side.