“You are late!” he exclaimed.  “I began to fear you would not be here to receive our guests with me.”

“Your guests?” Odo repeated.  “I had fancied there was but one.”

The Marquess smiled.  “My dear Mary of the Crucifix,” he said, “is too well-born to venture out alone at this late hour, and has prevailed on her bosom friend to accompany her.—­Besides,” he added with his deprecating shrug, “I own I have had too recent an experience of your success to trust you alone with my enchantress; and she has promised to bring the most fascinating nun in the convent to protect her from your wiles.”

As he spoke he led Odo into a room furnished in the luxurious style of a French boudoir.  A Savonnerie carpet covered the floor, the lounges and easy-chairs were heaped with cushions, and the panels hung with pastel drawings of a lively or sentimental character.  The windows toward the garden were close-shuttered, but those on the farther side of the room stood open on a starlit terrace whence the eye looked out over the lagoon to the outer line of islands.

“Confess,” cried Coeur-Volant, pointing to a table set with delicacies and flanked by silver wine-coolers, “that I have spared no pains to do my goddess honour and that this interior must present an agreeable contrast to the whitewashed cells and dismal refectory of her convent!  No passion,” he continued, with his quaint didactic air, “is so susceptible as love to the influence of its surroundings; and principles which might have held out against a horse-hair sofa and soupe a l’oignon have before now been known to succumb to silk cushions and champagne.”

He received with perfect good-humour the retort that if he failed in his designs his cook and his upholsterer would not be to blame; and the young men were still engaged in such banter when the servant returned to say that a gondola was at the water-gate.  The Marquess hastened out and presently reappeared with two masked and hooded figures.  The first of these, whom he led by the hand, entered with the air of one not unaccustomed to her surroundings; but the other hung back, and on the Marquess’s inviting them to unmask, hurriedly signed to her friend to refuse.

“Very well, fair strangers,” said Coeur-Volant with a laugh; “if you insist on prolonging our suspense we shall avenge ourselves by prolonging yours, and neither my friend nor I will unmask till you are pleased to set us the example.”

The first lady echoed his laugh.  “Shall I own,” she cried, “that I suspect in this unflattering compliance a pretext to conceal your friend’s features from me as long as possible?  For my part,” she continued, throwing back her hood, “the mask of hypocrisy I am compelled to wear in the convent makes me hate every form of disguise, and with all my defects I prefer to be known as I am.”  And with that she detached her mask and dropped the cloak from her shoulders.

The gesture revealed a beauty of the laughing sensuous type best suited to such surroundings.  Sister Mary of the Crucifix, in her sumptuous gown of shot-silk, with pearls wound through her reddish hair and hanging on her bare shoulders, might have stepped from some festal canvas of Bonifazio’s.  She had laid aside even the light gauze veil worn by the nuns in gala habit, and no vestige of her calling showed itself in dress or bearing.