German cavalry uniform strode up in recognition, and bowing low over Valentine’s outstretched hand, said in French—

“My dear Countess! How very delighted we are to have you here with us to-night! You will spare me a dance, will you not? May I be introduced to the Count?”

“My husband—Captain von Stolberg, of the German Embassy.”

And we shook hands. Was this fellow the lover? I wondered.

“I met the Countess at Vichy last autumn,” explained the Captain in very good English. “She spoke very often of you. You were away in Scotland, shooting the grouse,” he said.

“Yes—yes,” I replied for want of something better to say.

We both chatted with the young attaché for a few minutes, and then, as a waltz struck up, he begged a dance of my “wife,” and they both whirled down the room. Valentine was a splendid dancer, and as I watched them I wondered what could be the nature of the plot in progress.

I did not come across my pretty fellow-traveller for half an hour, and then I found that the Captain had half filled her programme. Therefore I “lay low,” danced once or twice with uninteresting Belgian matrons, and spent the remainder of the [Pg 55]night in the fumoir, until I found my “wife” ready to return to the Grand.

[Pg 55]

When we were back in the salon at the hotel she asked—

“How do you like the Captain, M’sieur Ewart? Is he not—what you call in English—a duck?”

“An over-dressed, swaggering young idiot, I call him,” was my prompt reply.

“And there you are right—quite right, my dear M’sieur Ewart. But you see we all have an eye to business in this affair. He will call to-morrow, because he is extremely fond of me. Oh! if you had heard all his pretty love phrases! I suppose he has learnt them out of a book. They couldn’t be his own. Germans are not romantic—how can they be? But he—ah! he is Adonis in the flesh—with corsets!” And we laughed merrily together.

“He thinks you are fond of him—eh?”

“Why, of course. He made violent love to me at Vichy. But he was not attaché then.”

“And how 

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