"I'm so glad you were able to be here in time for my little party, Lord Leighton," said Nitocris, when she had ended the welcoming of the other guests. "Dad will be delighted, too——"
She stopped rather suddenly, remembering that Dad would have to tell his young friend the sad story of the mysterious loss of the Mummy; but another subject was uppermost in her mind just then, and, taking refuge in it, she went on quickly:
"Come along to the lawn. I want to introduce you to a very distinguished gentleman—and his wife and daughter. No less a person, my lord, than the great Professor Hoskins van Huysman!"
"What!" exclaimed Leighton, with a laugh that was almost boyish for such a serious and learned young man. "The Huysman: the Professor's most doughty antagonist in the arena of symbols and theorems? Oh, now that is good!"
"Yes; I think you will find him very interesting," replied Nitocris, hoping in her soul that he would find Brenda a great deal more interesting. "Come along, or Dad will be beginning to think that I am neglecting my duties, and I must be on quite my best behaviour to-day. We are favoured by the presence of another very celebrated celebrity to-day. That tall man who came in just before you was Prince Oscar Oscarovitch."
"Oh yes," he said lightly; "I recognised the brute."
"The brute? Dear me, that is rather severe. Then you know His Highness?" she asked in a low, almost eager, voice.
"There are not many men in the Near or Far East who have not some cause to know His Highness," he replied in a serious tone, tinged by the suspicion of a sneer. "He is about the finest specimen of the well-veneered savage that even Russia has produced for the last century. He is a brilliant scholar, statesman, and soldier; delightful among his equals—or those he chooses to consider so—charming to men, and, they say, almost irresistible to women; but to his opponents and his inferiors, a pitiless brute-beast without heart, or soul, or honour. A curious mixture: but that's the man."
"How awful!" murmured Nitocris. "Fancy a man like that being in such a position!"
But, although she did not understand why, she had heard his harshly-spoken words with a positive sense of relief. They exactly translated and crystallised her first inexplicable feelings of desperate aversion—almost of terror.