In any case this spring seemed to have penetrated even as far as the master of the house—the Archduke Henry Francis—in person. It was his first appearance in his wife's salon since the terrible day when he came there in search of Verdier to take him off almost by force to the laboratory. Those who had assisted at his cavalier entrance upon that occasion, and who were again present this evening, Madame de Chésy, for example, Madame Bonnacorsi, Madame Brion, who had come from Monte Carlo for two days, and Hautefeuille, were astounded by the change.
The tyrant was in one of his rare moments of good humor, when it was impossible to dislike him. He went about from group to group with a kindly word for all. In his quality of Emperor's nephew, and one who had almost ascended the throne, he had the princely gift of an infallible memory for faces. This enabled him to call by their names people who had been presented to him only once. And he joined to this quality another, one that disclosed him to be a man of superior calibre, an astonishing power of talking with each upon his special subject. To a Russian general, famous for having built at great peril a railroad through an Asiatic desert, he spoke of the Trans-Caspian plains with the knowledge of an engineer, coupled to a thorough familiarity with hydrography. He recited a verse from the Parisian novelist's first work, a volume of poems now too little known. With a diplomatist who had been for a long time in the United States he discussed the question of tariffs, and immediately afterward recommended the latest model of gun, with all the knowledge of a maker, to the celebrated pigeon shot. He talked with Madame Bonnacorsi about her ancestors in Venice, like an archæologist from the St. Mark library; with Madame de Chésy about her costumes, like some habitué of the Opéra, and had a kindly and private word for Madame Brion about the Rodier firm and the rôle it was playing in an important Austrian loan.
This prodigious suppleness of intellect, assisted by such a technical memory, made him irresistibly seductive when he chose to be winning.
He had thus arrived, amid general fascination, at the last salon, when he saw his wife talking with Hautefeuille. At this sight, as though it were an additional pleasure to surprise Ely tête-à-tête with the young man, his blue eyes, which shone so brightly in his ruddy face, became even more brilliant still. Advancing toward the pair, who became silent when they saw him approaching, he said in an easy manner to the Baroness, the friendliness of the tone accentuating the irony of the words:—
"I do not see your friend Miss Marsh this evening. Is she not here?"
"She told me she would come," replied Madame de Carlsberg. "She is perhaps indisposed."
"Have you not seen her to-day?" asked the Prince.
"Yes, I saw her this morning.—Will Your Highness tell me why you ask the question?"
"Simply because I am deeply interested in everybody who interests you," replied the Archduke.
As he uttered the insolently mocking phrase, the eyes of the terrible man shot a glance at Hautefeuille that was so savage that he felt an almost magnetic thrill shoot through him. It was only a flash and then the Prince was in another group talking, this time about horses and the last Derby with the Anglomaniac Navagero, without paying any more attention to the two lovers, who separated after a couple of minutes, heavy with unuttered thoughts.