And the man, a timorous German, went.

A few minutes later Steinmetz, presenting himself at the door of the little drawing-room attached to Etta’s suite of rooms, found the princess in a matchless tea-gown waiting beside a table laden with silver tea appliances.  A dainty samovar, a tiny tea-pot, a spirit-lamp and the rest, all in the wonderful silver-work of the Slavonski Bazaar in Moscow.

“You see,” she said with a smile, for she always smiled on men, “I have obeyed your orders.”

Steinmetz bowed gravely.  He was one of the few men who could see that smile and be strong.  He closed the door carefully behind him.  No mention was made of the fact that his message had implied, and she had understood, that he wished to see her alone.  Etta was rather pale.  There was an anxious look in her eyes—­behind the smile, as it were.  She was afraid of this man.  She looked at the flame of the samovar, busying herself among the tea-things with pretty curving fingers and rustling sleeves.  But the tea was never made.

“I begin to think,” said Steinmetz, coming to the point in his bluff way, “that you are a sort of beautiful Jonah, a graceful stormy petrel, a fair Wandering Jewess.  There is always trouble where you go.”

She glanced at his broad face, and read nothing there.

“Go on,” she said.  “What have I been doing now?  How you do hate me, Herr Steinmetz!”

“Perhaps it is safer than loving you,” he answered, with his grim humor.

“I suppose,” she said, with a quaint little air of resignation which was very disarming, “that you have come here to scold me—­you do not want any tea?”

“No; I do not want any tea.”

She turned the wick of the spirit-lamp, and the peaceful music of the samovar was still.  In her clever eyes there was a little air of sidelong indecision.  She could not make up her mind how to take him.  Her chiefest method was so old as to be biblical.  Yet she could not take him with her eyelids.  She had tried.

“You are horribly grave,” she said.

“The situation,” he replied, “is horribly grave.”

Etta looked up at him as he stood before her, and the lamp-light, falling on the perfect oval of her face, showed it to be white and drawn.

“Princess,” said the man, “there are in the lives of some of us times when we cease to be men and women, and become mere human beings.  There are times, I mean, when the thousand influences of sex die at one blow of fate.  This is such a time.  We must forget that you are a beautiful woman; I verily believe that there is none more beautiful in the world.  I once knew one whom I admired more, but that was not because she was more beautiful.  That, however, is my own story, and this”—­he paused and looked round the little room, furnished, decorated for her comfort—­“this is your story.  We must forget that I am a man, and therefore subject to the influence of your beauty.”