“It is the people, my dear young lady, that lend interest to the world.”

“Paul took me out in a sleigh this morning,” went on Maggie, in her cheerful voice that knew no harm.  “I liked every thing—­the policemen in their little boxes at the street corners, the officers in their fur coats, the cabmen, every-body.  There is something so mysterious about them all.  One can easily make up stories about every-body one meets in Petersburg.  It is so easy to think that they are not what they seem.  Paul, Etta, even you, Herr Steinmetz, may not be what you seem.”

“Yes, that is so,” answered Steinmetz, with a laugh.

“You may be a Nihilist,” pursued Maggie.  “You may have bombs concealed up your sleeves; you may exchange mysterious passwords with people in the streets; you may be much less innocent than you appear.”

“All that may be so,” he admitted.

“You may have a revolver in the pocket of your dress-coat,” went on Maggie, pointing to the voluminous garment with her fan.

His hand went to the pocket in question, and produced exactly what she had suggested.  He held out his hand with a small silver-mounted revolver lying in the palm of it.

“Even that,” he said, “may be so.”

Maggie looked at it with a sudden curiosity, her bright eyes grave.

“Loaded?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I will not examine it.  How curious!  I wonder how near to the mark I may have been in other ways.”

“I wonder,” said Steinmetz, looking at Etta.  “And now tell us something about the princess.  What do you suspect her of?”

At this moment Paul came into the room, distinguished-looking and grave.

“Miss Delafield,” pursued Steinmetz, turning to the new-comer, “is telling us her suspicions about ourselves.  I am already as good as condemned to Siberia.  She is now about to sit in judgment on the princess.”

Maggie laughed.

“Herr Steinmetz has pleaded guilty to the worst accusation,” she said.  “On the other counts I leave him to his own conscience.”

“Any thing but that,” urged Steinmetz.

Paul came forward, and Maggie rather obviously avoided looking at him.

“Tell us of Paul’s crimes first,” said Etta, rather hurriedly.  She glanced at the clock, whither Karl Steinmetz’s eyes had also travelled.

“Oh, Paul,” said Maggie, rather indifferently.  Indeed, it seemed as if her lightness of heart had suddenly failed her.  “Well, perhaps he is deeply involved in schemes for the resurrection of the Polish kingdom, or something of that sort.”

“That sounds tame,” put in Steinmetz.  “I think you would construct a better romance respecting the princess.  In books it is always the beautiful princesses who are most deeply dyed in crime.”

Maggie opened her fan and closed it again.

“Well,” she said, tapping on the arm of her chair with it; “I give Etta a mysterious past.  She is the sort of person who would laugh and dance at a ball with the knowledge that there was a mine beneath the floor.”