“I want you particularly to-morrow night,” said the lady; “I have some people coming.  I will send a card to your club this evening.”

And she turned to say good-bye to a departing guest.  Deulin was at Cartoner’s elbow again.

“Here,” he said, taking him by the sleeve and speaking in his own tongue, “I wish to present you to friends of mine.  Prince Pierre Bukaty,” he added, stopping in front of a tall, old man, with bushy, white hair, and the air of a mediaeval chieftain, “allow me to present my old friend Cartoner.”

The two men shook hands without other greeting than a formal bow.  Deulin still held Cartoner by the sleeve, and gently compelled him to turn towards a girl who was looking round with bright and eager eyes.  She had a manner full of energy and spirit, and might have been an English girl of open air and active tastes.

“Princess Wanda,” said the Frenchman, “my friend Mr. Cartoner.”

The eager eyes came round to Cartoner’s face, of which the gravity seemed suddenly reflected in them.

“He is the best linguist in Europe,” said Deulin, in a gay whisper; “even Polish; he speaks with the tongue of men and of angels.”

And he himself spoke in Polish.

Princess Wanda met Cartoner’s serious eyes again, and in that place, where human fates are written, another page of those inscrutable books was folded over.

V

AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

Prince Bukaty was an affable old man, with a love of good wine and a perfect appreciation of the humorous.  Had he been an Englishman, he would have been an honest squire of the old Tory type, now fast fading before facilities for foreign travel and a cheap local railway service.  But he was a Pole, and the fine old hatred which should have been bestowed upon the Radicals fell to the lot of the Russians, and the contempt hurled by his British prototype upon Dissent was cast upon Commerce as represented in Poland by the thrifty German emigre.

The prince carried his bluff head with that air which almost invariably bespeaks a stormy youth, and looked out over mankind from his great height as over a fine standing crop of wild oats.  As a matter of fact, he had grown to manhood in the years immediately preceding those wild early sixties, when all Europe was at loggerheads, and Poland seething in its midst, as lava seethes in the crater of a volcano.

The prince had been to England several times.  He had friends in London.  Indeed, he possessed them in many parts of the world, and, oddly enough, he had no enemies.  To his credit be it noted that he was not an exile, which is usually another name for a scoundrel.  For he who has no abiding city generally considers himself exempt from the duties of citizenship.

“They do not take me seriously,” he said to his intimate friends; “they do not honor me by recognizing me as a dangerous person; but we shall see.”