“Welcome home, Horace!” she said in that low sweet voice which was one of her most potent charms.  “How kind it is of you to pay me a visit so soon after your return!”

She placed herself on the couch and motioned to him to take a seat near her.  He drew up his chair, and a short, embarrassed pause succeeded.

Mrs. Rutherford toyed with her fan and stole glances from under her long black lashes at her visitor, who sat twisting one of his gloves and wishing most ardently that Providence had entrusted the painful task before him to some one of a more obdurate and less chivalrous nature.

Wearied of silence, the lady spoke at last.

“Have you nothing of interest respecting your travels to tell me?” she asked.

Her voice seemed to break the spell which paralyzed him.  He turned toward her with the look of one who nerves himself up to take a desperate resolution: 

“Yes:  I have a story to relate to you, and one of more than common interest.”

“Really!” She yawned behind her fan.  “Excuse me, but I was at Mrs. Houdon’s ball last evening, and the ‘German’ was kept up till five o’clock this morning.  I am wretchedly tired.  Now do go on with your story:  I have no doubt but that I shall find it amusing, but do not be much surprised if I fall asleep.”

“I think you will find it interesting, and I have no fear of its putting you to sleep.  But you must make me one promise.  I am but a poor narrator, and you must engage not to interrupt me.”

“I have no hesitation in promising to remain perfectly quiet, no matter how startling your incidents or how vivid your descriptions may be.”

She leaned back among the cushions with another stifled yawn and shaded her eyes with her fan.  Without heeding the veiled impertinence of her manner, Horace commenced his narrative: 

“Some twenty-five years ago a friendless, penniless Englishwoman died at one of the cheap boarding-schools in Dieppe, where she had officiated for some time as English teacher and general drudge.  She left behind her a little girl about five years of age—­a pretty, engaging child, whose beauty and infantile fascinations so won the heart of Madame Tellier, the proprietress of the establishment, that she decided to take charge of the little creature and educate her, her project being to fit her for the post of English teacher in her school.  But the pretty child grew up to be a beautiful but unprincipled girl, with an inborn passion for indolence and luxury.  At the age of seventeen she eloped from the school with a young Parisian gentleman, who had been spending the summer months at one of the seaside hotels in Dieppe, and her benefactress saw her and heard of her no more.

“We will pass over the events of the next few years.  It would hardly interest you to follow, as I did, each step by which the heroine of my history progressed ever downward on the path of vice.  We find her at last traveling in Italy under the protection of the Count von Erlenstein, an Austrian noble of great wealth and dissolute character.  She has cast aside the name she once bore, and, anticipating the jewel-borrowed cognomens of Cora Pearl and La Reine Topaze, she adopts a title from the profusion of pink coral jewelry which she habitually wears, and Rose Sherbrooke is known as Rose Coral.”