“You must not take me too seriously,” she begged, smiling.  “I spoke foolishly, perhaps, but only for your good.  You see, Mr. Francis Norgate, I am just a little interested in you and your career.”

“And I, dear Baroness,” he replied, smiling across at her, “am more than a little interested in—­you.”

She unfurled her fan.

“I believe,” she sighed, “that you are going to flirt with me.”

“I should enter into an unequal contest,” Norgate asserted.  “My methods would seem too clumsy, because I should be too much in earnest.”

“Whatever the truth may be about your methods,” she declared, “I rather like them, or else I should not be risking my reputation in this still prudish city by dining with you alone and without a chaperon.  Tell me a little about yourself.  We have met three times, is it not—­once at the Embassy, once at the Palace, and once when you paid me that call.  How old are you?  Tell me about your people in England, and where else you have served besides Paris?”

“I am thirty years old,” he replied.  “I started at Bukarest.  From there I went to Rome.  Then I was second attache at Paris, and finally, as you see, here.”

“And your people—­they are English, of course?”

“Naturally,” he answered.  “My mother died when I was quite young, and my father when I was at Eton.  I have an estate in Hampshire which seems to get on very well without me.”

“And you really care about your profession?  You have the real feeling for diplomacy?”

“I think there is nothing else like it in the world,” he assured her.

“You may well say that,” she agreed enthusiastically.  “I think you might almost add that there has been no time in the history of Europe so fraught with possibilities, so fascinating to study, as the present.”

He looked at her keenly.  It is the first instinct of a young diplomatist to draw in his horns when a beautiful young woman confesses herself interested in his profession.

“You, too, think of these things, then?” he remarked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“But naturally!  What is there to do for a woman but think?  We cannot act, or rather, if we do, it is in a very insignificant way.  We are lookers-on at most of the things in life worth doing.”

“I will spare you all the obvious retorts,” he said, “if you will tell me why you are gazing into that mirror so earnestly?”

“I was thinking,” she confessed, “what a remarkably good-looking couple we were.”

He followed the direction of her eyes.  He himself was of a recognised type.  His complexion was fair, his face clean-shaven and strong almost to ruggedness.  His mouth was firm, his nose thin and straight, his grey eyes well-set.  He was over six feet and rather slim for his height.  But if his type, though attractive enough, was in its way ordinary, hers was entirely unusual.  She, too, was slim,