Touched, and reassured at the ex-maid’s appearance, the Queen judged, at last, it was safe to unbend. Already very remote and unworldly in her novice’s dress, she had ceased, indeed, to be a being there was need any more to either circumvent, humour, or suppress; and now that the threatened danger was gone, her Majesty glanced, half-lachrymosely, about among her personal belongings for some slight token of “esteem” or _souvenir_. Skimming from cabinet to cabinet, in a sort of hectic dance, she began to fear, as she passed her bibelots in review, that beyond a Chinese Buddha that she believed to be ill-omened, and which for a nun seemed hardly suitable, she could spare nothing about her after all, and in some dilemma, she raised her eyes, as though for a crucifix, towards the wall. Above the long-chair a sombre study of a strangled negress in a ditch by Gauguin conjured up to-day with poignant force a vivid vision of the Tropics. “The poor Duchess!” she involuntarily sighed, going off into a train of speculation of her own. Too tongue-tied, or, perhaps, too discreet, to inform the Queen that anything she might select would immediately be confiscated by the Abbess, Sister Irene, while professing her rosary, appraised her surroundings with furtive eyes, crossing herself frequently with a speed, and facility due to practice whenever her glance chanced to alight on some nude shape in stone. Keen, meagre, and perhaps slightly malicious, hers was a curiously pinched face--like a cold violet. “The Abbess is still in retreat; but sends her duty,” she ventured as the Queen approached a gueridon near which she was standing. “Indeed? How I envy her,” the Queen wistfully said, selecting, as suited to the requirements of the occasion, a little volume of a mystic trend, the _Cries of Love_ of Father Surin,[12] bound in grey velvet, which she pressed upon the reluctant novice, with a brief, but cordial, kiss of farewell. “She looked quite pretty!” she exclaimed, sinking to the long-chair as soon as the nuns had gone. “So like the Cimabue in the long corridor ...” the Countess of Tolga murmured chillily; It was her present policy that her adored ally, Olga Blumenghast, should benefit by Mademoiselle de Nazianzi’s retirement from Court, by becoming nearer to the Queen, when they would work all the wires between them. “I’d have willingly followed her,” the Queen weariedly declared, “at any rate, until after the wedding.” “It seems that I and Lord Derbyfield are to share the same closed carriage in the wake of the bridal coach,” the Countess of Tolga said, considering with a supercilious air her rose _suède_ slipper on the dark carpet. “He’s like some great Bull. What do you suppose he talks about?” The Countess d’Omptyda repressed a giggle. “They tell me Don Juan was nothing _nothing_ to him.... He cannot see, he cannot be, oh every hour. It seems he can’t help it, and that he simply _has_ to!”