Mouse laughed, rather rudely, and her laughter brought a slight angry flush to the cheek of Prince Khris. He had both noble and royal blood in his veins, and at the sound of that derisive little laugh he could have strangled her with pleasure. By an odd contradiction, Lady Kenilworth offended him by precisely that same kind of bluntness and nakedness of speech with which her brother had offended herself. The delicate euphemisms which she expected to have used to please herself seemed to her altogether ridiculous when they were required by another person. “Englishwomen are always so coarse,” he thought; “they never understand veiled phrases. They will call their spade a spade. There is no need to do so, whether you are digging a grave with it or digging for gold; it can always be a drawing-room fire-shovel for other people, whatever work it may accomplish. “Yes, you are quite right, dear lady,” he added, after a slight pause. “The task is not a light one; we will divide its difficulties. I have experience that you have not yet gained; you have influence that I have--alas!--lost. Let us take counsel together. Our friends the Massarenes are good people--excellent people; it is a pleasure to guide them in the way they should go.” He remained with her half an hour, and only left her when it was announced that her carriage was waiting below. He kissed her hand with all the reverential grace which a fine gentleman can lend to his farewell; but as he descended the staircase and went into the street, he swore under his breath. “There is no devil like a blonde devil!” he thought. “Mouse they call her! A rat! a rat! with teeth as sharp as nails and claws which can cling like a flying bat’s! It is little use for the world to have made woman all these thousands of years; she remains just what she was in Eve’s time, in Eriphyle’s time--always the same--always purchasable, always venal, always avaricious! Ah! why was this rodent not my daughter? We would have made the world our oyster, and no one should have known the taste of an oyster but ourselves!” Whilst he passed along Stanhope Street into the Park his own daughter was standing in a room of a secluded and aristocratic hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain, where she had arrived that morning. She was dressed in black, with three strings of pearls round her throat; they were the pearls she had worn on her ill-fated marriage-day. She was a woman of singular beauty; the kind of beauty which resists sorrow and time, and ennobles even the mask of death. With her was one of her cousins, Ernst von Karstein, the only one of her family who had been faithful to her through good and evil report, who had loved her always, before her marriage and after it; but who had always known that he could look for no response from her. “You are always well, Olga,” he was saying now. “What amulet have you?” “I imagine,” she answered, “that my talisman consists in absolute indifference as to whether I be ill or well.”