He paused abruptly.  Naida smiled at him.

“After her escape from Germany, I suppose you were going to say?  You see, I know all about it.  There was no Prince Shan in Berlin.”

He shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“Well,” he admitted, “I don’t quite bring myself to believe in your terrible ogre, so I shall not worry.  Tell me what news you have from Russia?”

“Political?”

“Any news.”

She smiled.

“I notice,” she said, “that English people are changing their attitude towards my country.  A few years ago she seemed negligible to them.  Now they are beginning to have—­shall I call them fears?  Even my kind host, I think, would like to know what is in Paul Matinsky’s heart as he hears the friends of Oscar Immelan plead their cause.”

“I admit it,” he told her frankly.  “I will go farther.  I would give a great deal to know what is in your own mind to-day concerning us and our destiny.  But these things are not for the moment.  It was not to discuss or even to think of them that I asked you here to-day.”

“Why did you invite me, then?” she asked, smiling.

“Because I wanted the pleasure of having you opposite me,” he replied,—­“because I wanted to know you better.”

“And are you progressing?”

“Indifferently well,” he acknowledged.  “I seem to gain a little and slide back again.  You are not an easy person to know well.”

“Nothing that is worth having is easy,” she answered, “and I can assure you, when my friendship is once gained, it is a rare and steadfast thing.”

“And your affection?” he ventured.

Her eyes rested upon his for a moment and then suddenly drooped.  A little tinge of colour stole into her cheeks.  For a moment she seemed to have lost her admirable poise.

“That is not easily disturbed,” she told him quietly.  “I think that I must have an unfortunate temperament, there are so few people for whom I really care.”

He took his courage into both hands.

“I have heard it rumoured,” he said, “that Matinsky is the only man who has ever touched your heart.”

She shook her head.

“That is not the truth.  Paul Matinsky cares for me in his strange way, and he has a curiously exaggerated appreciation of my brain.  There have been times,” she went on, after a moment’s hesitation, “when I myself have been disturbed by fancies concerning him, but those times have passed.”

“I am glad,” he said quietly.

His fingers, straying across the tablecloth, met hers.  She did not withdraw them.  He clasped her hand, and it remained for a moment passive in his.  Then she withdrew it and leaned back in her chair.

“Is that meant to introduce a more intimate note into our conversation?” she asked, with a slight wrinkling of the forehead and the beginnings of a smile upon her lips.

“If I dared, I would answer ’yes’,” he assured her.