'Then you will know more than I do. Sabina--light my meerschaum, there's a darling; it will taste the sweeter after your lips.' And Claude laid his delicate woman-like limbs upon the sofa, and looked the very picture of luxurious nonchalance. 'What is he, you pitiless wretch?' 'Fairest Hebe, fill our Prometheus Vinctus another glass of Burgundy, and find your guitar, to silence him.' 'It was the ocean nymphs who came to comfort Prometheus--and unsandalled, too, if I recollect right,' said Lancelot, smiling at Sabina. 'Come, now, if he will not tell me, perhaps you will?' Sabina only blushed, and laughed mysteriously. 'You surely are intimate with him, Claude? When and where did you meet him first?' 'Seventeen years ago, on the barricades of the three days, in the charming little pandemonium called Paris, he picked me out of a gutter, a boy of fifteen, with a musket-ball through my body; mended me, and sent me to a painter's studio. . . . The next sejour I had with him began in sight of the Demawend. Sabina, perhaps you might like to relate to Mr. Smith that interview, and the circumstances under which you made your first sketch of that magnificent and little-known volcano?' Sabina blushed again--this time scarlet; and, to Lancelot's astonishment, pulled off her slipper, and brandishing it daintily, uttered some unintelligible threat, in an Oriental language, at the laughing Claude. 'Why, you must have been in the East?' 'Why not! Do you think that figure and that walk were picked up in stay-ridden, toe-pinching England? . . . Ay, in the East; and why not elsewhere? Do you think I got my knowledge of the human figure from the live-model in the Royal Academy?' 'I certainly have always had my doubts of it. You are the only man I know who can paint muscle in motion.' 'Because I am almost the only man in England who has ever seen it. Artists should go to the Cannibal Islands for that. . . . J'ai fait le grand tour. I should not wonder if the prophet made you take it.' 'That would be very much as I chose.' 'Or otherwise.' 'What do you mean?' 'That if he wills you to go, I defy you to stay. Eh, Sabina!' 'Well, you are a very mysterious pair,--and a very charming one.' 'So we think ourselves--as to the charmingness. . . . and as for the mystery . . . "Omnia exeunt in mysterium," says somebody, somewhere- -or if he don't, ought to, seeing that it is so. You will be a mystery some day, and a myth, and a thousand years hence pious old ladies will be pulling caps as to whether you were a saint or a devil, and whether you did really work miracles or not, as corroborations of your ex-supra-lunar illumination on social questions. . . . Yes . . . you will have to submit, and see Bogy, and enter the Eleusinian mysteries. Eh, Sabina?' 'My dear Claude, what between the Burgundy and your usual foolishness, you seem very much inclined to divulge the Eleusinian mysteries.'