"Fool! Look, fool, and read what vengeance visits a fool who is fool enough
to play the spy!"
He brandished the papers before those glazing eyeballs.
In an eldritch cackle he translated:
_"'He who bears this message is a Prussian dog, police trained, a spy. Let
his death be a dog's, cruel and swift.--Number One.'"_
XVIII
ORDEAL
Reviewing the day, as she undressed and prepared for bed, Sofia told
herself she had never yet lived through one so wearing, and thought the
history of its irksome hours all too legible in the lack-lustre face that
looked back from the mirror when Chou Nu uncoifed her hair and brushed its
burnished tresses.
Though she had slept late, in fact till noon and something after, her sleep
had been queerly haunted and unhappy, she could not remember how or why,
and she had awakened already ennuye, with a mind incoherently oppressed,
without relish for the promise of the day--in a mood altogether as drear as
the daylight that waited upon her unclosing eyes.
Main strength of will had not availed to dispel these vapours, neither did
their melancholy yield to the distraction provided by first acquaintance
with ways of a world unique alike in Sofia's esteem and her experience.
She who had theretofore known only in day-dreams the life of light
frivolity and fashion which found feverish and trumpery reflection at
Frampton Court, was neither equipped nor disposed to be hypercritical in
the first hours of her debut there; and at any other time, in any other
temper, she knew, she must have been swept off her feet by its exciting
appeal to her innate love of luxury and sensation.
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