“More than enough,” he assured her.  “You have done your work wonderfully.”

“Shall I now deal with her?” she continued, with a slight, eager movement of her head towards the opposite box.

He smiled.

“She is harmless, she and her entourage,” he replied.  “Some stroke of good fortune brought them word of the meeting between myself and Immelan, and beyond that they guessed at its significance.  They were at the shed to watch my arrival.  Now, with their mouths open, they sit and wait for the information which they hope will drop in.  They are very ingenuous, these Anglo-Saxons, but they are not diplomats.”

She turned her head and looked across the auditorium.  Maggie was talking to a man whom Nigel had just brought in, and who was bending over her in obvious admiration.  Nita, with her wealth of cosmetics, her over-red lips, stared curiously at this possible rival, with her clear skin, her beautiful neck and shoulders, her hair dressed close to her head, her air of quiet, almost singular distinction.

“The young lady,” she confessed, “wears her clothes well for an English woman.  She is bien soignee, but she looks a little difficult.”

His eyes followed the direction of hers, and her object was achieved.  She read correctly the light that gleamed in them.

“I may come to-night?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head.

“Not again,” he replied.

A violinist now held the stage, a Pole newly come to London.  La Belle Nita closed her eyes.  For a few minutes her sorrow seemed to throb to the minor music to which she was listening.

“For all my work, then,” she said presently, “for the suffering and the risk, there is to be nothing?”

“Is it nothing for you to be invited to live in whatsoever manner you choose?” he remonstrated.

“It is little,” she replied steadily.  “There are a dozen who would do this for me, who pray every day that they may do so.  What are all these things beside the love of my master?”

He looked at her a little sadly, yet without any sign of real feeling.  To him she represented nothing more than a doll with brains, from whose intelligence he had profited, but of whose beauty he was weary.

“You know what our poet says, Nita,” he reminded her. “’Love is like the rustling of the wind in the almond trees before dawn.’  We cannot command it.  It comes to us or leaves us without reason.”

She looked across the auditorium once more and spoke with her head turned away from her companion.

“There is no one in the East,” she said, “because those who write me weekly send news of my lord’s doings.  There is no one in the East, because there they give the body who know nothing of the soul.  And so my Prince is safe amongst them.  But here—­these western women have other gifts.  Is that she, master of my life and soul?”

“I met her this evening for the first time,” he replied.