“No. She didn’t sing,” said Brancepeth, greatly interested. “She seemed to pray no end, and she cried. But she cried so beautifully. Not as most of them do who make such figures of themselves. But the tears just brimming in her eyes and falling, like the what d’ye call ’em, you know, the Magdalens in the picture galleries.” The Prince laughed outright. “For felicitous allusion your Englishman has never an equal,” he thought, whilst he said aloud: “My dear lord, what did I tell you? Olga is _femme, très femme_. If I wanted to weep I should not go to the Oratory myself. But a woman does go. It is a consolation to her to be admired and pitied, and I have no doubt she observed that you did both.” “She didn’t even see me,” said the younger man, on whose not oversensitive nerves something in the elder’s tone grated. “Her father don’t do much to save her character,” he thought. “It’s an ill bird fouls its own nest.” Meanwhile Mouse had listened with scarcely concealed impatience to all these questions and answers. She sat apparently engrossed in the pages of the Almanac de Gotha, but in reality losing nothing of her friend’s interrogations and implications. At last, out of patience, she closed the little red book and said imperiously to Brancepeth: “Surely it is time you went on guard? Have you any idea what time it is? Besides, if you don’t mind my saying so, I want to talk about something to the Prince before I go for my drive.” “I aren’t on guard to-day; but I’ll go, of course, if you want me to go,” murmured Brancepeth sulkily, raising his lazy long limbs out of his comfortable resting-place with a sense of regret, for he would willingly have gone on talking about the lady of the Oratory for another hour. “Such a dear good boy, but always wanting in tact,” said Lady Kenilworth, as the door of the morning-room closed on him. “Wanting in reason too. To talk of another woman when he is in the presence of Lady Kenilworth! What obtuseness! what blindness,” said Prince Khris with graceful gallantry. “But Englishmen are always like that. They go all round the world and see nothing but their own umbrellas; they keep on their hats in St. Peter’s, and set up their kodaks at the Taj Mahal. I have always said that a people who could conquer India and yet clothe their Viceroy in a red cloth tunic, are a people without perception. They travel, but they remain islanders. Their minds are enfolded in their bath-towels and sanitary flannels. They do not see beyond the rim of their tubs. But I believe you did me the honor to wish to speak to me? I need not say that if there be the smallest thing in which I can be of service you command my devotion.” Mouse sat dreamily and irritably opening and shutting the Almanac de Gotha. Prince Khristof wore a wholly altered aspect to her now that she saw him as the father of a woman whom Harry admired and had followed.