was Count Balanoff, the Russian Ambassador, a widower.... "You know," she said to Roger in one of her many smoking-room tête-à-tête confidences—"he is ’richissime,’ and really rather decent, though he does dye his hair.... Gold mines in Siberia, turquoise mines in the Caucasus.... He seemed quite to _want_ to marry me, at one time.... Vicky Masham thinks it was the Queen who interposed. If he’d asked me and I’d accepted I should have made myself in no time the most talked-about woman in Europe. I’d have negotiated an alliance with Russia—always an idea of mine—and have paid the Kaiser out for his Kruger telegram—Why is it, Roger, there isn’t a _rush_ to marry me? I’ve ten thousand a year for life; I’m only thirty-six, which nowadays is equivalent to twenty-six; I’ve a splendid constitution, my hair’s my own and so are my teeth, my figure is perfect.... I might be an artist’s model for the ’tout ensemble.’ ... And yet ... (a pause for smoking). "And it isn’t as though the re-marriage of titled women was ’mal vu’ at Court any longer.... There’s Lady Landolphia Birchall. She’s going to be married again in the autumn; this time to a ’booky’—for he really is nothing more, though he takes bets with the Prince. And she’s turned fifty. But the Queen doesn’t seem to mind...." But to return to the theme from which this digression started. Sibyl had asked four great Imperialists down to Glen Sporran to make Roger’s acquaintance: the Honble. Darcy Freebooter, Percy Bracket—Editor of the _Sentinel_—the Right Honble. J. Applebody Bland, and Albert Greystock, grandson of old Lord Bewdly. She would have liked to have captured Mr. Rudyard Kipling, but he had perversely gone to the United States, a region which lay outside Sibyl’s calculations, since we could neither annex it nor protect it. She had even tried to include the great Choselwhit in the company, the mysterious idol before whom and whose non-committal eyeglass so much imperialistic incense was then burnt. But he had answered coldly, in an undistinguished handwriting, that he regretted a previous engagement. "I don’t mind admitting, it’s _rather_ a snub," she said to her quite indifferent cousin, "and it _vexes_ me because he is the coming man. It is _he_ we must look to, to lead the Unionist, the Imperial Party; not those effete Brinsleys with their antiquated love of Free Trade and the Church of England.... I’m very much ’in’ just now with Laura Sawbridge ... you know, that clever woman-writer and traveller. She says she can turn Chocho _round her little finger_. It was _he_ who sent her out to ... (rest whispered). Well, you see what _that_ means? Chocho is lying low, but he means to get even with old Kruger and paint the Transvaal red...."