During the three days and a half anticipated by Cyril, he and his secretary remained under a ban, and moved about among the crowds of _Kurgäste_ as little noticed as if they had been two invisible men, and almost as freely as if they had had Ludwigsbad to themselves. They were apparently unseen when, with their Bohemian glass tumblers suspended from their buttonholes, they joined the shivering throngs that surround in the early morning the kiosks from which the horrible healing waters are dispensed, and partook of their respective draughts, Cyril taking the proper eight glasses and Mansfield only one, purely for the sake of sociability. In the promenade which followed they met no one who was conscious of ever having seen them before; and when they had bought the regulation rolls and sat down to drink their coffee at a little table surrounded by scores of others, they were not only alone but unperceived in the crowd. In the afternoon they paid no visits and received none; and at dinner-time, when merry parties were formed round all the restaurant-tables, they sat down alone save for the company of the taciturn Thracian secretary Paschics, who seemed to be given over to perpetual mourning for the high position his employer had once held and lost. Not that their isolated condition made their table less gay than the rest. Cyril, always debonnaire and cheerful, exerted himself determinedly on these occasions to bring a smile to the melancholy countenance of Paschics, with the result that Mansfield became almost exhausted with laughing. The waiters hovered attentively in their neighbourhood, eager to catch a stray joke; and even the Kurdirektor, a very high and mighty autocrat indeed, found himself tempted by the peals of laughter to smoke a cigarette and partake of dessert in company with these victims of popular disapproval. One evening there was a dance after dinner at the Kursaal, and Cyril and Mansfield strolled in among the spectators, enjoying hugely the promptness with which way was made for them, as though they had been royal personages, or surrounded by an invisible but tangible fence. That is to say, Cyril enjoyed the experience frankly for its own sake, and Mansfield because he reflected that it was in Cyril’s cause he was undergoing it. Two years of fairly constant intercourse with Lady Philippa Mortimer had not tended to diminish his early veneration for her adored uncle, and there was also the further consolation for such hardship as his lot involved that she would regard it with sympathy--even with admiration.