Mrs. Craig Fontaine’s box was in the lower grand tier in that favored circle which, in the present struggle for social supremacy, is the ultimate battlefield. Her entrance was one of the six important arrivals of the night which affected the immense audience with a curiosity only less intense than the entrance of the prima donna. Mrs. Fontaine, approaching the curtain that shut out the swimming vision of faces, took a preparatory glance, and as the row of boxes still showed a profusion of gaps, she delayed their entrance on the pretext of waiting for Mrs. Kildair. Besides Gunther and Beecher, there were in the party Lady Fitzhugh Mowbray, a young woman of the striking English blonde type, and the Duke de Taleza-Corti, of the royal house of Italy, a cosmopolite, dry, frail in body, affecting the English monocle, with a perpetual introspective smile on his keen lips. The absence of Mrs. Kildair had left Mrs. Fontaine in very bad humor. Not only did she consider an invitation to her box as a sort of royal command that should take precedence over all calamities, and render accidents impossible, but she felt that she would miss the effect which her well-balanced party had promised. Fortunately, at that moment the door opened and Mrs. Kildair entered. "My dear Mrs. Fontaine," she said immediately, in a voice that could not be heard by the rest, "the explanation I sent you is not true. It was not a question of a break-down. There are crises in our lives that cannot be put off. I can tell you no more than this, but I know you will understand that nothing except a matter of supreme importance would ever make me miss an invitation of yours." Mrs. Fontaine looked at her and, seeing beyond the surface calm the fires of a profound agitation, was pleased that Mrs. Kildair had not sought an easy excuse, but had thrown herself on her woman’s generosity. Also she perceived that she was strikingly dressed in a robe of that luminous, elusive green that breaks forth in the flickering driftwood, subdued and given distance by a network of black lace. It was exactly the contrast that she would have chosen as a foil to her own costume. She smiled, pressed her guest’s hand sympathetically and signaled to Gunther, who removed her wrap. Mrs. Kildair murmured an involuntary tribute while the Duke de Taleza-Corti, with the over-frank admiration which the Latin permits, said point blank: "If I am to sit behind you, Madame, you must bandage my eyes." Mrs. Fontaine had chosen the one color which, above all others, seemed to have been created to frame her dark imperious beauty—a warm purple, the tone of autumn itself, which gave to her shoulders and throat the softness of ivory. About her neck was a double string of pearls which were worth ten times the receipts of the house.