the mystery that enveloped her which kept him silent. Something in her voice, her manner, reminded him in the most tantalising way of somebody else and for the life of him he could not think who that somebody was.

“No,” she replied to his invitation, “I will not disgrace you by dancing--you the Vicomte de Nérac and I--” she smiled. “Besides you have seen me dance in the only kind of dancing that I care about. But see,” she added, dropping her voice, “do you not recognise a friend, perhaps a partner? Is she not charming--conquering and to conquer?”

“Name of a dog!” he ejaculated.

Away at the other end of the ballroom was a raised dais on which was gathered a bevy of the fairest of the _bourgeoisie_. One of them, escorted by three or four gentlemen, was descending the stairs into the throng--a woman in the guise of Diana, clad in the airiest, gauziest, purest white, with a silver bow in her hand and a quiver on her shoulder and a jewelled half-moon in her powdered hair. It was--yes, it was--the fair huntress of the woods of Versailles, to-night a matchless spectacle of majestic beauty which rippled over into the gayest, most provocative coquetry imaginable--Juno and Venus and Diana in one and defying you to say which was the more divine. And that cunningly arranged robe of glittering white, with its artful jewels to suggest every curve and line, was just what witchery would have chosen to be the foil to the laughter of her eyes and the subtle sheen of her skin. What other woman could have worn it? But for the one who dared, it was the homage of a woman’s art to the triumph of nature’s womanhood.

André watched her with absorbing interest. Fate had ordained that this woman’s ambitions should be bound up with his. But how? how?

“She has a mind,” his companion was saying, “as well as incomparable beauty. That Abbé at her elbow is Monsieur de Bernis, a poverty-stricken poet who writes her love-letters for her, whom she will make great some day, perhaps, and if Monsieur de Voltaire cared as much for balls as for the muses, he, too, would be snarling his honeyed venom in her ear. She can act and dance and sing. She will not always be Madame d’Étiolles.”

The plans of years were sweeping through André’s brain. What if the crystal--the thought was cut short by a stately flourish of trumpets and the loud hum of applause.

“See,” the sorceress whispered, “the King has arrived.”Men and women pressed to the entrance and then fell back--on all sides the 

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