He shook his head.
"Not again," he replied.
A violinist now held the stage, a Pole newly come to London. La Belle Nita closed her eyes. For a few minutes her sorrow seemed to throb to the minor music to which she was listening.
"For all my work, then," she said presently, "for the suffering and the risk, there is to be nothing?"
"Is it nothing for you to be invited to live in whatsoever manner you choose?" he remonstrated.
"It is little," she replied steadily. "There are a dozen who would do this for me, who pray every day that they may do so. What are all these things beside the love of my master?"
He looked at her a little sadly, yet without any sign of real feeling. To him she represented nothing more than a doll with brains, from whose intelligence he had profited, but of whose beauty he was weary.
"You know what our poet says, Nita," he reminded her. "'Love is like the rustling of the wind in the almond trees before dawn.' We cannot command it. It comes to us or leaves us without reason."
She looked across the auditorium once more and spoke with her head turned away from her companion.
"There is no one in the East," she said, "because those who write me weekly send news of my lord's doings. There is no one in the East, because there they give the body who know nothing of the soul. And so my Prince is safe amongst them. But here—these western women have other gifts. Is that she, master of my life and soul?"