“At what time,” she asked, “is he coming in?”

“About half-past nine.”

Etta had a watch on a bracelet on her arm.  Such women always know the time.

It was a race, and Etta won it.  She had only half an hour.  De Chauxville was there, and Maggie with her quiet, honest eyes.  But the widow of Sydney Bamborough made Paul ask her to be his wife, and she promised to give him his answer later.  She did it despite a thousand difficulties and more than one danger—­accomplished it with, as the sporting people say, plenty to spare—­before the door behind them was opened by the attendant, and Karl Steinmetz, burly, humorously imperturbable and impenetrable, stood smiling gravely on the situation.

He saw Claude de Chauxville, and before the Frenchman had turned round the expression on Steinmetz’s large and placid countenance had changed from the self-consciousness usually preceding an introduction to one of a dim recognition.

“I have had the pleasure of meeting madame somewhere before, I think.  In St. Petersburg, was it not?”

Etta, composed and smiling, said that it was so, and introduced him to Maggie.  De Chauxville took the opportunity of leaving that young lady’s side, and placing himself near enough to Paul and Etta to completely frustrate any further attempts at confidential conversation.

For a moment Steinmetz and Paul were left standing together.

“I have had a telegram,” said Steinmetz in Russian.  “We must go back to Tver.  There is cholera again.  When can you come?”

Beneath his heavy mustache Paul bit his lip.

“In three days,” he answered.

“True?  You will come with me?” enquired Steinmetz, under cover of the clashing music.

“Of course.”

Steinmetz looked at him curiously.  He glanced toward Etta, but he said nothing.

CHAPTER VIII

SAFE!

The season wore on to its perihelion—­a period, the scientific books advise us, of the highest clang and crash of speed and whirl, of the greatest brilliancy and deepest glow of a planet’s existence.  The business of life, the pursuit of pleasure, and the scientific demolition of our common enemy, Time, received all the care which such matters require.

Debutantes bloomed and were duly culled by aged connoisseurs of such wares, or by youthful aspirants with the means to pay the piper in the form of a handsome settlement.  The usual number of young persons of the gentler sex entered the lists of life, with the mistaken notion that it is love that makes the world go round, to ride away from the joust wiser and sadder women.

There was the same round of conventional pleasures which the reader and his humble servant have mixed in deeply or dilettante, according to his taste or capacity for such giddy work.  There was withal the usual heart-burning, heart-bartering, heart—­anything you will but breaking.  For we have not breaking hearts among us to-day.  Providence, it would seem, has run short of the commodity, and deals out only a few among a number of persons.