It was his impression that she had taken the house in South Street but for three months; yet, gracious heaven, what had she not put into it? The Prince asked himself this question without violence, for that was not to be his line to-day. He could be angry to a point at which he himself was often frightened, but he honestly believed this to be only when he had been baited past endurance, so that as a usual thing he was really as mild and accommodating as the extreme urbanity of his manner appeared to announce. There was indeed nothing to suggest to the world in general that he was an impracticable or vindictive nobleman: his features were not regular and his complexion had a bilious tone; but his dark brown eye, which was at once salient and dull, expressed benevolence and melancholy; his head drooped from his long neck in a considerate, attentive style; and his close-cropped black hair, combined with a short, fine, pointed beard, completed his resemblance to some old portrait of a personage of distinction under the Spanish dominion at Naples. To-day at any rate he had come in conciliation, almost in humility, and that is why he didn’t permit himself even to murmur at the long delay he had to accept. He knew very well that if his wife should consent to take him back it would be only after a probation to which this little wait in her drawing-room was a trifle. It was a quarter of an hour before the door opened, and even then it was not the Princess who appeared, but only Madame Grandoni. Their greeting was at first all a renouncement of words. She came to him with both hands outstretched, and took his own and held them a while, looking up at him with full benignity. She had elongated her florid, humorous face to a degree that was almost comical, and the pair might have passed, in their silent solemnity, for acquaintances meeting in a house in which last obsequies were about to take place. It was indeed a house on which death had descended, as he very soon learned from Madame Grandoni’s expression; something had perished there for ever and he might proceed to bury it as soon as he liked. His wife’s ancient German friend, however, was not a person to sustain that note very long, and when, after she had made him sit down on the sofa beside her, she shook her head slowly and definitely several times, it was with a brow on which a more genial appreciation of the facts had already begun to appear. “Never—never—never?” said the Prince in a deep hoarse voice, a voice at variance with his attenuated capacity. He had much of the complexion which in late-coming members of long-descended races we qualify to-day as effete; but his tone might have served for the battle-cry of some deep-chested fighting ancestor.