“It may be,” he replied, “and it very well may be,” he went on, “that our ante-nativity was a little more brilliant, a little more _h--m_ ...; and there is nothing unorthodox in thinking so.” “O what did I do then to lose my wings?? What did I ever say to Them?! Father, Father. How did I annoy God? Why did He put me here?” “My dear child, you ask me things I do not know; but it may be you were the instrument appointed above to lead back to Him our neighbour yonder,” Father Nostradamus answered, pointing with his breviary in the direction of St Helena. “Never speak to me of that wretched old man.” For despite the ablest tactics, the most diplomatic angling, Count Cabinet had refused to rally. “We followed the sails of your skiff to-day,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi sighed, “until the hazes hid them!” “I had a lilac passage.” “You delivered the books?” The Countess shrugged. “I shall never forget this afternoon,” she said. “He was sitting in the window over a decanter of wine when I floated down upon him; but no sooner did he see me, than he gave a sound, like a bleat of a goat, and disappeared: I was determined however to call! There is no bell to the villa, but two bronze door-knockers, well out of reach, are attached to the front-door. These with the ferrule of my parasol I tossed and I rattled, until an adolescent, with Bougainvillea at his ear, came and looked out with an insolent grin, and I recognised Peter Passer from the Blue Jesus grown quite fat.” “Eh mon Dieu!” Father Nostradamus half-audibly sighed. “Eh mon Dieu ...” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi echoed, her gaze roving over the palace, whose long window-panes in the setting sun gleamed like sumptuous tissues. “So that,” the Countess added, “I hardly propose to venture again.” “What a site for a Calvary!” Father Nostradamus replied, indicating with a detached and pensive air the cleft in the White Mountain’s distant peaks. “I adore the light the hills take on when the sun drops down,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi declared. “It must be close on _Salut_....” It was beneath the dark colonnades by the Court Chapel door that they received the news from the lips of a pair of vivacious dowagers that the Prince was to leave the Summer-Palace on the morrow to attend “the Manœuvres,” after which it was expected his Royal Highness would proceed “_to England_.” X