“Yes, it has been happy.  May there be many like it!” she answered.

“There shall be,” said Claudius; “good-night, Countess.”

“Good-night—­good-night, Claudius.”

The Duke waited fully ten minutes for the Doctor.  It was the second time she had spoken his name without the formality of a prefix, and Claudius stood where she left him, thinking.  There was nothing so very extraordinary in it, after all, he thought.  Foreign women, especially Russians, are accustomed to omit any title or prefix, and to call their intimate friends by their simple names, and it means nothing.  But her voice was so wonderful.  He never knew his name sounded so sweet before—­the consonants and vowels, like the swing and fall of a deep silver bell in perfect cadence.  “A little longer,” thought Claudius, “and it shall be hers as well as mine.”  He took a book from the table absently, and had opened it when he suddenly recollected the Duke, put it down and left the room.

Soon a noiseless individual in a white waistcoat and a dress-coat put his head in at the door, advanced, straightened the chairs, closed the book the Doctor had opened, put the gas out and went away, shutting the door for the night, and leaving the room to its recollections.  What sleepless nights the chairs and heavy-gilt glasses and gorgeous carpets of a hotel must pass, puzzling over the fragments of history that are enacted in their presence!

CHAPTER XI.

Mr. Barker’s urgent engagement up town that evening must have been to meet some one; but considering that the individual he might be supposed to be awaiting did not come, he showed a remarkable degree of patience.  He went to a certain quiet club and ordered, with the utmost care, a meal after his own heart—­for one; and though several members hailed him and greeted him on his return, he did not seem particularly interested in what they had to say, but sat solitary at his small square table with its exquisite service; and when he had eaten, and had finished his modest pint of Pommery Sec, he drank his coffee and smoked his own cigars in undisturbed contemplation of the soft-tinted wall-paper, and in calm, though apparently melancholy, enjoyment of the gentle light that pervaded the room, and of the sweet evening breeze that blew in from the trees of Madison Square, so restful after the dust and discomfort of the hot September day.

Whoever it was that he awaited did not come, and yet Mr. Barker exhibited no sign of annoyance.  He went to another room, and sat in a deep arm-chair with a newspaper which he did not read, and once he took a scrap of paper from his pocket and made a short note upon it with a patent gold pencil.  It was a very quiet club, and Mr. Barker seemed to be its quietest member.  And well he might be, for he had made up his mind on a grave point.  He had determined to marry.