“That is what I object to about them,” Mrs. Howard remarked presently, “their abominable arrogance.  Look at that man.  It is just as though there was no one else on this balcony but himself—­no one else exists for him!”

“Why, Sabine, you are severe!  He looks to me to be a pretty considerably nice man—­and he is only reading the paper as I have been doing myself,” Mr. Cloudwater rejoined.  “Perhaps he is the English nobleman who I read was expected to-day—­Lord Fordyce, the paper said—­and wasn’t that the name of rather a prominent English politician who had to go into the Upper House last year when his father died—­and it was considered he would be a loss to the Commons?”

“I really don’t know.  I don’t take the slightest interest in them or their politics.  Ah! here is Moravia——­” and both rose to meet a very charming lady who drove up in a victoria and got out.

She had all the perfection of detail which characterizes the very best-dressed American woman—­and she had every attraction except, perhaps, a voice—­but even that she knew how to modulate and disguise, so that it was no wonder that the Princess Torniloni passed for one of the most beautiful women in Rome or Paris, or Cairo or New York, whenever she graced any of the cities with her presence.  She was a widow, too, and very rich.  The Prince, her husband, had been dead for nearly two years, and she was wearing grays and whites and mauves.

He had been a brute, too, but unlike her friend, Mrs. Howard’s husband, he had had the good taste to be killed riding in a steeplechase, and so all went well, and the pretty Princess was free to wander the world over with her indulgent father.

“It is just too lovely for words up in those woods, papa,” she said, “and I have had my tea in a dear little chalet restaurant.  You did not wait for me, I hope?”

They assured her they had not done so, and she sat down in a comfortable chair.  Her arrival caused a flutter among the other occupants of the terrace, and even the Englishman glanced up.  This group had at last made some impression it would seem upon the retina of his eye, for he looked deliberately at them and realized that the two women were quite worthy of his scrutiny.

“But I hate Americans,” he said to himself.  “They are such actresses, you never know where you are with them—­these two, though, appear some of the best.”

Presently they went into the hotel, passing him very closely—­and for a second his eyes met the violet ones of Sabine Howard, and he was conscious that he felt distinctly interested, much to his disgust.

But, after all, he was here for a cure and a rest, and he had always believed in women as recreations.

His solitary table was near theirs in the restaurant, and later he wrote to his friend, Michael Arranstoun, loitering at Ostende: