As we were speaking, we observed a crowd of distinguished persons gathered about and following his Highness, as he moved.  He spoke now to one; now to another.  Honoria, fascinated, her beauty every instant becoming more radiant, just leaned, with the lightest pressure, upon the Duke’s arm.  They were promenading through the rooms.  The music, soft and low, continued, but the groups of dancers broke up, the loiterers in the gallery came in, and as the sun draws his fifty, perhaps his hundreds of planets, circling around and near him, this noble luminary centred in himself the attention of all.  If they could not speak with him, they could at least speak of him.  If they could not touch his hand, they could pass before him and give one glance at his eyes.  The less aristocratic were even satisfied for the moment with watching the singular being, Reve de Noir,—­who caught no one’s eye, seemed to see no one but his master,—­and yet was not here nor there, nor in any place,—­never in the way, a thing of air, and not tangible, but only black.

At a signal, he would advance and present to his master a perfume, a laced handkerchief, a rose of rubies, a diamond clasp; of many with whom he spoke the liberal Duke begged the acceptance of some little token, as an earnest of his esteem.  After interchanging a few words with Jeffrey Lethal,—­who dared not utter a sarcasm, though he chafed visibly under the restraint,—­the Duke’s tasteful generosity suggested a seal ring, with an intaglio head of Swift cut in opal, the mineral emblem of wit, which dulls in the sunlight of fortune, and recovers its fiery points in the shade of adversity;—­Reve de Noir, with a movement so slight, ’twas like the flitting of a bat, placed the seal in the hand of the Duke, who, with a charming and irresistible grace, compelled Lethal to receive it.

To Denslow, Honoria, Dalton, and myself he offered nothing.—­Strange?—­Not at all.  Was he not the guest, and had not I been presented to him by Honoria as her “friend?”—­a word of pregnant meaning to a Duke of Rosecouleur!

To Adonais he gave a lock of hair of the great novelist, Dumas, in a locket of yellow tourmaline,—­a stone usually black.  Lethal smiled at this.  He felt relieved.

“The Duke,” thought he, “must be a humorist.”

From my coarse way of describing this, you would suppose that it was a farcical exhibition of vulgar extravagance, and the Duke a madman or an impostor; but the effect was different.  It was done with grace, and, in the midst of so much else, it attracted only that side regard, at intervals, which is sure to surprise and excite awe.