Like the reflection of a camera-obscura, memory painted a sudden picture on the void; she saw herself sitting amid the branches of a tulip-tree, while some one sang--a song the wind was humming in the cordage: "Forgotten you? Well, if forgetting Be yearning with all my heart, With a longing, half pain and half rapture, For the time when we never shall part; If the wild wish to see you and hear you, To be held in your arms again-- If this be forgetting, you're right, dear, And I have forgotten you then." Great, slow tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. CHAPTER XLVIII WHILE THE CITY SLEPT Daunt accompanied his chief that evening to a dinner at the Nobles' Club--a "stag," for conventional functions had been discontinued since the royal death had cast a pall over the stay of the Squadron. As they drove thither a nearer shadow was over the Ambassador's spirits. His thoughts would stray to Barbara and her misfortune, which seemed so deep and irreparable. He had eventually accepted his wife's diagnosis as to Daunt's _tendresse_, but he had a confidence that his Secretary of Embassy, though hard-hit, would bear no scars. He could not guess all that lay beneath the brave domino Daunt was wearing. The affair was a late one, with various native divertisements: top-spinners, painters whose exquisite brush-etchings, done in a few seconds, were given as mementoes to the guests, and jugglers who, utterly without paraphernalia, caused live fowl to appear in impossible places. Toward the close the Ambassador found himself seated beside the Minister of Marine. "Very clever," he said, as a Chinese pheasant flew out of an inverted opera-hat. "I almost believe he could produce my missing dog if he were properly urged." "Have you lost one?" asked the Admiral. "I'm sorry." The Ambassador laughed. "It was really something of a relief," he said, and told the story of the Russian wolf-hound which had so curiously disappeared on the evening of Doctor Bersonin's call. "The oddest thing about it," he ended, "is that, though the name of the Embassy was on his collar, nothing has been heard of him."