Moving slowly toward the door, drooping, Sofia made inarticulate response.
She felt suddenly stupefied with fatigue. To think meant an effort that
mocked her flagging powers. A vast lassitude was weighing upon her, body
and spirit were faint in the enervation of an inexorable disconsolation.



VI

THE MUMMER


Alone with his secretary, Prince Victor Vassilyevski dropped indifferently
the guise of manner with which he had clothed himself for the benefit of
the woman whom he claimed as his own child. That semblance of shy affection
coloured by regrets for the past and modified by the native nobility of a
prince in exile--so becoming in a parent to whose bosom a daughter whom he
had never seen was suddenly restored--being of no more service for the
present, was incontinently discarded. In its stead Victor favoured Karslake
with a slow smile of understanding that broadened into an insuppressible
grin of successful malice, a grimace of crude exultation through which
peered out the impish savage mutinously imprisoned within a flimsy husk of
modern manner.

Suspecting this self-betrayal, he erased the grin swiftly, but not so
swiftly that Karslake failed to note it. And the young man, smiling amiably
and respectfully in return, was sensible of a thrill: yet another glimpse
had been given him into the mystery that slept behind that countenance
normally so impenetrable.