“No.... Believe me, my dear, he’s not worth the trouble!” Mademoiselle Blumenghast clasped her hands brilliantly across the nape of her neck. “I want to possess him at dawn, at dawn,” she broke out: “Beneath a sky striped with green....” “Oh, Olga!” “And I never shall rest,” she declared, turning away on a languid heel, “until I _do_.” Meditating upon the fever of Love, Mademoiselle de Nazianzi directed her course slowly towards her room. She lodged in that part of the palace known as ‘The Bachelors’ Wing,’ where she had a delicious little suite just below the roof. “If she loved him absolutely,” she told herself, as she turned the handle of her door, “she would not care about the colour of the sky--; even if it snowed, or hailed!” Depositing her fan upon the lid of an old wedding-chest that formed a couch, she smiled contentedly about her. It would be a wrench abandoning this little apartment that she had identified already with herself, when the day should come to leave it for others more spacious in the Keep. Although scarcely the size of a ship’s cabin, it was amazing how many people one could receive together at a time merely by pushing the piano back against the wall, and wheeling the wedding-chest on to the stairs, and once no fewer than seventeen persons had sat down to a birthday _fête_, without being made too much to feel like herrings. In the so-called salon, divided from her bedroom by a folding lacquer screen, hung a few studies in oils executed by herself, and which, except to the initiated, or the naturally instinctive, looked sufficiently enigmatic against a wall-paper with a stealthy design. Yes it would be a wrench to quit the little place, she reflected, as she began setting about her toilet for the night. It was agreeable going to bed late without anybody’s aid, when one could pirouette interestingly before the mirror in the last stages of déshabille, and do a thousand (and one) things besides[2] that one might otherwise lack the courage for. But this evening being in no frivolous mood, she changed her ball-dress swiftly for a robe-de-chambre bordered deeply with ermins, that made her feel nearer somehow to Yousef, and helped her to realise, in its various facets, her position as future Queen. “Queen!” she breathed, trailing her fur flounces towards the window. Already the blue revolving lights of the Café Cleopatra were growing paler with the dawn, and the moon had veered a little towards the Convent of the Flaming-Hood. Ah ... how often as a lay boarder there had she gazed up towards the palace wondering half-shrinkingly what life “in the world” was like; for there had been a period indeed, when the impulse to take the veil had been strong with her--more, perhaps, to be near one of the nuns whom she had _idolised_ than from any more immediate vocation.