“I should rather think not!” interrupted Lord Fulkeward, hastily. “By Jove! She wouldn’t have a hair left on her head in London, don’cher know!”
“What do you mean?” inquired Muriel Chetwynd Lyle, simpering. “You really do say such funny things, Lord Fulkeward!”
“Do I?” and the young nobleman was so alarmed and embarrassed at the very idea of his ever saying funny things that he was rendered quite speechless for a moment. Anon he took heart and resumed: “Er—well—I mean that the society women would tear her to bits in no time. She’d get asked nowhere, but she’d get blackguarded everywhere; she couldn’t help herself with that face and those eyes.”
His mother laughed.
“Dear Fulke! You are such a naughty boy! You shouldn’t make such remarks before Lady Lyle. She never says anything against anyone!”
“Dear Fulke” stared. Had he given vent to his feelings he would have exclaimed: “Oh, Lord!—isn’t the old lady a deep one!” But as it was he attended to his young moustache anxiously and remained silent. Lady Chetwynd Lyle meanwhile flushed with annoyance; she felt that Lady Fulkeward’s remark was sarcastic, but she could not very well resent it, seeing that Lady Fulkeward was a peeress of the realm, and that she herself, by the strict laws of heraldry, was truly only “Dame” Chetwynd Lyle, as wife of an ordinary knight, and had no business to be called “her ladyship” at all.
“I should, indeed, be sorry,” she said, primly, “if I were mistaken in my private estimate of the Princess Ziska’s character, but I must believe my own eyes and the evidence of my own senses, and surely no one can condone the extremely fast way in which she behaved with that new man—that French artist, Armand Gervase—last night. Why, she danced six times with him! And she actually allowed him to walk home with her through the streets of Cairo! They went off together, in their fancy dresses, just as they were! I never heard of such a thing!”
“Oh, there was nothing remarkable at all in that,” said Lord Fulkeward. “Everybody went about the place in fancy costume last night. I went out in my Neapolitan dress with a girl, and I met Denzil Murray coming down a street just behind here—took him for a Florentine prince, upon my word! And I bet you Gervase never got beyond the door of the Princess’s palace; for that blessed old Nubian she keeps—the chap with a face like a mummy—bangs the gate in everybody’s face, and says in guttural French: ‘La Princesse ne voit per-r-r-sonne!’ I’ve tried it. I tell you it’s no go!”
“Well, we shall all get inside the mysterious palace next Wednesday evening,” said Lady Fulkeward, closing her eyes with a graceful air of languor. “It will be charming, I am sure, and I daresay we shall find that there is no mystery at all about it.”
“Two months ago,” suddenly said a smooth voice behind them, “the Ziska’s house or palace was uninhabited.”