Red Masquerade | Page 8

through business which convention has designated
as appropriate to such circumstances. At bottom he was being
stimulated to thought more than to derision.
Putting the letters aside, he bowed his head upon a hand and reflected
sagely that love was the very deuce.
He wondered if he could or ever would love or be loved so madly.
He rather hoped not ...
Here, if you please, was the scion of a reigning royal family risking as
pretty a scandal as one could well imagine--and all for love! Given a
few more days of life, and he would have jeopardized his right of
succession and set half-a-dozen European chancelleries by the
ears--and all for love! But for his untimely end, that poor, pretty
creature would have joined her life to his, consummating at one stroke
her freedom from the intolerable conditions of existence with Victor
and a diplomatic convulsion which might only too easily have
precipitated all Europe into a great war--and all for lawless love!
So once more in history Death had served well the interests of public
morality.
After a year these letters alone survived ...
How they had survived, what hands had collected and secreted them,
and for what purpose, intrigued the imagination no end. Lanyard
inclined to credit Princess Sofia with the indiscretion of saving these
souvenirs of a grande passion that had almost made history. There was
the sentimental motive to account for such action, and another: the
satisfaction of knowing she had concrete proof of her intention to treat
Victor as he had treated her.
Then somehow the painting must have passed out of her possession;
and in all likelihood she had made frantic and awkward efforts to
regain it which had aroused the suspicions of Victor; with the sequel of
that afternoon....
Lanyard's speculations were interrupted by the peremptory telephone.
Without premonition he picked up the combination receiver and
transmitter. But his memory was still so haunted by echoes of that
delightful voice which he had heard in the auction room, he couldn't
entertain any doubt that he heard it now.
"Are you there?" it said "Will you be good enough to put me through to

Monsieur Lanyard?"
The inspiration to mischief was instantaneous: Lanyard replied
promptly in accents as much unlike his own as he could manage:
"Sorry, ma'am; Mister Lanyard dined hout to-night. Would there be any
message, ma'am?"
"Oh, how annoying!"
"Sorry, ma'am."
"Do you know when he will be home?"
"If this is the lidy 'e was expectin' to call this evenin'--"
"Yes?" the dulcet voice said, encouragingly.
"--Mister Lanyard sed as 'ow 'e might be quite lite, but 'e'd 'urry all 'e
could, ma'am, and would the lidy please wite."
"Thank you so much."
"'Nk-you, ma'am."
Smiling, Lanyard replaced the receiver and rang for the waiter.
When that one answered, the adventurer was hatted and coated and
opening his door.
"I'm called out," he said--"can't quite say when I'll be back. But I'm
expecting a lady to call. Will you tell the doorman to show her into my
rooms, please, and ask her to wait."

VI
THÉRÈSE
Posed in a blaze of lights, the Princess Sofia contemplated captiously
the charming image reflected in her cheval-glass. One little wrinkle, not
precisely of dissatisfaction, rather of enquiry, nestled between her
delicately arched brows. A look of misgiving clouded her wide eyes of
a wondering child. The bow of an exquisitely modelled mouth, whose
single fault lay in its being perhaps a trace too wide, described a
shadowy pout.
She was beautiful: yes. Nobody could question that. La beauté du
diable, no doubt, to Anglo-Saxon eyes, with that skin of incomparable
texture and whiteness relieved by a heavily coiled crown of living
bronze, the crimson insolence of that matchless mouth, those luminous
and changeable eyes so like the sea, whose green melted into blue with
the swiftness of thought, whose blue at times as swiftly shaded into
stormy purple-black: but however bizarre and barbaric, beauty none the

less, and under the most meticulous examination indisputable.
But was she as radiant as she had been?
On this her birthday she was twenty-five. Appalling age! Five years
hence she would be thirty, in ten more--forty! And woman's beauty
fades so swiftly: everybody said so. Was the shadow of to-morrow
already dimming her loveliness? How could it be otherwise? She had
lived so long and so fully, she had begun to live so young. Six years of
marriage to Victor--that alone should have been enough, one would
think, to metamorphose the fairest face into a blasted battlefield of
passions.
She had a little shiver of voluptuous horror, remembering what she had
endured and escaped. The sweet, true lines of her flawlessly made body
were transiently undulant within a sheath of shimmering sequins: a
daring gown, by