“I want nothing!” Sofia insisted, wildly.
“You want sleep,” Prince Victor corrected, fondly—“you want it badly. You are nervous, overstrung, in no condition to understand the great good fortune that has befallen you. But to-morrow you will see things in a rosier light.”
Apparently he had manipulated some signal unremarked by Sofia. The door opened, framing the figure of the man Nogam. Without looking round, but with an inscrutable smile, Prince Victor took the girl in his arms again and held her close.
“You rang, sir?”
“Oh, are you there, Nogam? Is the apartment ready for the Princess Sofia?”
“Quite ready, sir.”
“Be good enough to conduct her to it.” Again Prince Victor kissed Sofia’s forehead, then let her go. “Good-night, my child.”
Moving slowly toward the door, drooping, Sofia made inarticulate response. She felt suddenly stupefied with fatigue. To think meant an effort that mocked her flagging powers. A vast lassitude was weighing upon her, body and spirit were faint in the enervation of an inexorable disconsolation.
VI
THE MUMMER
Alone with his secretary, Prince Victor Vassilyevski dropped indifferently the guise of manner with which he had clothed himself for the benefit of the woman whom he claimed as his own child. That semblance of shy affection coloured by regrets for the past and modified by the native nobility of a prince in exile—so becoming in a parent to whose bosom a daughter whom he had never seen was suddenly restored—being of no more service for the present, was incontinently discarded. In its stead Victor favoured Karslake with a slow smile of understanding that broadened into an insuppressible grin of successful malice, a grimace of crude exultation through which peered out the impish savage mutinously imprisoned within a flimsy husk of modern manner.