It was eight o’clock; the sun was slanting in the west in a cloudless splendor, bathing the bright scene in a rich golden glow, and tinging to bronze the dark masses of the Black Forest.  In another hour he was the expected guest of a Russian Prince at a dinner party, where all that was highest, fairest, greatest, most powerful, and most bewitching of every nationality represented there would meet; and in the midst of this radiant whirlpool of extravagance and pleasure, where every man worth owning as such was his friend, and every woman whose smile he cared for welcomed him, he knew himself as utterly alone, as utterly doomed, as the lifeless Prussian lying in the dead-house.  No aid could serve him, for it would have been but to sink lower yet to ask or to take it; no power could save him from the ruin which in a few days later at the farthest would mark him out forever an exiled, beggared, perhaps dishonored man—­a debtor and an alien.

Where he had thrown himself on a bench beneath a mountain-ash, trying vainly to realize this thing which had come upon him—­and to meet which not training, nor habit, nor a moment’s grave reflection had ever done the slightest to prepare him; gazing, blankly and unconsciously, at the dense pine woods and rugged glens of the Forest that sloped upward and around above the green and leafy nest of Baden—­he watched mechanically the toiling passage of a charcoal-burner going up the hillside in distance through the firs.

“Those poor devils envy us!” he thought.  “Better be one of them ten thousand times than be trained for the Great Race, and started with the cracks, dead weighted with the penalty-shot of Poverty!”

A soft touch came on his arm as he sat there; he looked up, surprised.  Before him stood a dainty, delicate little form, all gay with white lace, and broideries, and rose ribbons, and floating hair fastened backward with a golden fillet; it was that of the little Lady Venetia,—­the only daughter of the House of Lyonnesse, by a late marriage of his Grace,—­the eight-year-old sister of the colossal Seraph; the plaything of a young and lovely mother, who had flirted in Belgravia with her future stepson before she fell sincerely and veritably in love with the gallant and still handsome Duke.

Cecil roused himself and smiled at her; he had been by months together at Lyonnesse most years of the child’s life, and had been gentle to her as he was to every living thing, though he had noticed her seldom.

“Well, Petite Reine,” he said kindly, bitter as his thoughts were; calling her by the name she generally bore.  “All alone?  Where are your playmates?”

“Petite Reine,” who, to justify her sobriquet, was a grand, imperial little lady, bent her delicate head—­a very delicate head, indeed, carrying itself royally, young though it was.

“Ah! you know I never care for children!”

It was said so disdainfully, yet so sincerely, without a touch of affectation, and so genuinely, as the expression of a matured and contemptuous opinion, that even in that moment it amused him.  She did not wait an answer, but bent nearer, with an infinite pity and anxiety in her pretty eyes.