Nearly a year had passed since General Ducros had dined with Count Valdemar and Ma'm'selle Sophie in Paris. It was Cowes week, and there was quite a cosmopolitan party at Orrel Court. Adelaide de Condé and Madame de Bourbon were the best of friends with Count Valdemar and Sophie. Clifford Vandel and Miss Chrysie were good friends with everybody, the latter especially good friends with Hardress, whose work was now rapidly approaching completion. In short, it was as charming a cosmopolitan party as you could have found on the Hampshire shore, or anywhere else; and none of the other guests of Lord Orrel, and there were several of them not unskilled in diplomacy, ever dreamt that under the surface of the smooth-flowing conversation, whether round the dinner-table at the Court, on the _Nadine_, which ran down the Southampton Water every day that there was a good race on, or at Clifford Vandel's bungalow at Cowes, whose smoothly shaven lawn sloped down almost to the water's edge, lay undercurrents of plot and counterplot, the issue of which was the question whether the dominion of the world was to be committed to Anglo-Saxon or Franco-Slav hands. One night--it was the evening after the great regatta--three conversations took place under the roof of Orrel Court, which the greatest newspapers of the two hemispheres would have given any amount of money to be able to report, since each of them was possibly pregnant with the fate of the world. When Clifford Vandel came up from the smoking-room a little after eleven he found Miss Chrysie waiting for him in the sitting-room of the suite of apartments that had been given to them in the eastern wing of the old mansion. "Don't you think you ought to be in bed, Chrysie, instead of sitting there smoking a cigarette, and--Why, what's the matter with you, girl?" He had begun with something like a note of reproach in his voice, but the last words were spoken in a tone of tender concern. She got up from her chair, went to the door, and shut it and locked it, and then, with her half-smoked cigarette poised between her fingers, her face pale, and her eyes aflame, she faced him and said, in low, quick-flowing tones: "Poppa, can't you see what's the matter?--you, who can see things months before they happen, and make millions by gambling on them?--you who did up Morgan himself over that wireless telegraphy combine--can't you see what's going on right here just under your nose?" "My dear Chrysie, what are you talking about? I've not noticed anything particular happening, except what's happened in the right way. What's the trouble?" "The trouble's that Frenchwoman--that second edition of Marie Antoinette. Can't you see what she's doing every hour and day of her life? Can't you see that she's as beautiful as an angel, and--well, as clever as the other thing, and that she's just playing her hand for all she's worth to get the man I want--the man I half-promised myself to a year ago!"