"Miss Marmion, I need not say how pleased I am to find that you are able to leave your room. May I hope that you will be able to dine?"
"Yes, Prince," she replied, in the same cold, mechanical voice in which she had answered the tidings of her father's death. "The worst is over now, I hope. Some time and some way we must all leave the world and, at least, there is the consolation that my father has left it perhaps a little better and a little wiser than he found it. That, I think is as much as the ordinary mortal may be permitted to hope for. We who hold the Doctrine do not sorrow for the dead: we only sorrow for ourselves who are left to wait until we may, perhaps, meet again."
"The Doctrine, Miss Marmion?" he asked, as he placed a chair for her at his right hand. "May I ask what the Doctrine is?"
"Of re-incarnation," she replied, sitting down and looking at him across the corner of the table.
"Really? I most sincerely wish that I could believe in it. Mr Amena, whom I took the great liberty of bringing to your garden-party, a man of very remarkable powers, as you saw, holds the Doctrine, as you call it, and he has been trying for months to convert me to it; but, as I said going to Elsinore, I'm afraid I am too hopelessly materialistic for any conversion to be possible in my case, at least as far as my present experiences have gone."
"As the belief so must be the faith," she said with a grave smile. "It is no more possible to have true faith when you do not really believe than it is to be hungry when you have not got an appetite. That is quite a material simile; but I think it is true."
"Absolutely true!" he replied, looking at her again with a note of interrogation in each eye. "But, really, these things are too deep for me, a mere human animal. And now, talking about appetite, here comes the soup."
The dinner à deux was just what he had intended it to be, simple and yet perfect in every detail. The subject of Franklin Marmion's departure from the world was, as if by mutual consent, dropped. Oscarovitch comforted such conscience as he had by trying to believe that what Nitocris had said about her belief in the Doctrine was to her really true. He also honestly believed that she had faced her great sorrow in solitude, and overcome it in the strength of that belief. Their conversation turned easily away to other topics, and by the time that coffee was brought in and he had obtained her permission to light a cigarette, his beautiful guest appeared to have left the recent past behind her, for the time being at least, and was almost as she had been during the run up to Elsinore.
Her manner was that of complete composure, and it is hardly necessary to say that this mastery of her emotion forced him to a degree of admiration, almost of worship, which the physical charm that appealed only to his animal senses could never have inspired. Here, truly, was the ideal Empress of the Russias and the East sitting almost beside him. And now the psychological moment had come!
"Will you excuse me for a couple of minutes, Miss Marmion?" he asked, as he finished his coffee and rose from his chair. "Going back to what you were saying about re-incarnation: I have something in my room which I hope may interest you. I got it from my friend, the miracle-worker. He told me a long story about it that I don't want to trouble you with: but the thing in itself is quite worth seeing. At least, I never saw anything like it before."