In the silence her hands toyed listlessly with the enamel bonbonniere, whose silver had lost all its bright enameling, and was dinted and dulled till it looked no more than lead.  The lid came off at her touch as she musingly moved it round and round; the chain and the ring fell into her lap; the lid remained in her hand, its interior unspoiled and studded in its center with a name in turquoise letters—­“Venetia.”

She started as the word caught her eye and broke her reverie; the color came warmer into her cheek; she looked closer and closer at the box; then, with a rapid movement, turned her head and gazed at her companion.

“How did you obtain this?”

“The chain, madame?  It had fallen in the water.”

“The chain!  No! the box!”

He looked at her in surprise.

“It was given me very long ago.”

“And by whom?”

“By a young child, madame.”

Her lips parted slightly, the flush on her cheeks deepened; the beautiful face, which the Roman sculptor had said only wanted tenderness to make it perfect, changed, moved, was quickened with a thousand shadows of thought.

“The box is mine!  I gave it!  And you?”

He rose to his feet, and stood entranced before her, breathless and mute.

“And you?” she repeated.

He was silent still, gazing at her.  He knew her now—­how had he been so blind as never to guess the truth before, as never to know that those imperial eyes and that diadem of golden hair could belong alone but to the women of one race?

“And you?” she cried once more, while she stretched her hand out to him.  “And you—­you are Philip’s friend? you are Bertie Cecil?”

Silently he bowed his head; not even for his brother’s sake, or for the sake of his pledged word, could he have lied to her.

But her outstretched hands he would not see, he would not take.  The shadow of an imputed crime was stretched between them.

“Petite Reine!” he murmured.  “Ah, God! how could I be so blind?”

She grew very pale as she sank back again upon the couch from which she had risen.  It seemed to her as though a thousand years had drifted by since she had stood beside this man under the summer leaves of the Stephanien, and he had kissed her childish lips, and thanked her for her loving gift.  And now—­they had met thus!

He said nothing.  He stood paralyzed, gazing at her.  There had been no added bitterness needed in the cup which he drank for his brother’s sake, yet this bitterness surpassed all other; it seemed beyond his strength to leave her in the belief that he was guilty.  She in whom all fair and gracious things were met; she who was linked by her race to his past and his youth; she whose clear eyes in her childhood had looked upon him in that first hour of the agony that he had suffered then, and still suffered on, in the cause of a coward and an ingrate.