you do, Mr. Field?"—a woman's voice, an English voice.

   The mandarin turned round.

   From a black mask, a pair of blue-gray eyes looked into his broad, bland Chinese face; and a black domino dropped him an extravagant little curtsey.

   "How do you do?" he responded. "I'm afraid I'm not Mr. Field; but I'll gladly pretend I am, if you'll stop and talk with me. I was dying for a little human conversation."

   "Oh you're afraid you're not Mr. Field, are you?" the mask replied derisively. "Then why did you turn when I called his name?"

   "You mustn't hope to disconcert me with questions like that," said he. "I turned because I liked your voice."

   He might quite reasonably have liked her voice, a delicate, clear, soft voice, somewhat high in register, with an accent, crisp, chiselled, concise, that suggested wit as well

   as distinction. She was rather tall, for a woman; one could divine her slender and graceful, under the voluminous folds of her domino.

   She moved a little away from the door, deeper into the conservatory. The mandarin kept beside her. There, amongst the palms, a

    fontaine lumineuse

   was playing, rhythmically changing colour. Now it was a shower of rubies; now of emeralds or amethysts, of sapphires, topazes, or opals.

   "How pretty," she said, "and how frightfully ingenious. I am wondering whether this wouldn't be a good place to sit down. What do

    you

   think?" And she pointed with a fan to a rustic bench.

   So they sat down on the rustic bench, by the

    fontaine lumineuse

   .

   "In view of your fear that you're not Mr. Field, it's rather a coincidence that at a masked ball in Vienna you should just happen to be English, isn't it?" she asked.

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