For one mad moment, as he looked into her eyes, he thought the tightened cord he sometimes felt tugging at his tired brain had snapped, and the images of sight and memory gone hopelessly confused. She stood near the end of the line with the princesses of secondary rank, and the jewels in her hair were not more scintillant than her eyes as he bent over her hand. She went a little pale, but she greeted him bravely, and when they found themselves unobserved for a moment she spoke to him in her soft, careful English:
"You recognized me, you remember, for a play actor, and now you are come from the world's end to see me perform on my tiny stage! Alas, dear critic, since my last excursion, I am no longer letter perfect in my part!"
They met but once again. It was in the crush of guests in the great hall where her old Prince, in the splendor of his decoration-covered coat, was waiting to hand her to her carriage. There was a brief time in which to snatch the doubtful sweetness of a few hurried words. She was leaving in the early morning for the petty Balkan province where her husband held a miniature sway, over a handful of half-savage subjects. Hardly more than a renewal of greeting and a farewell, and she was gone!
As the old Prince wrapped her more carefully in her furs, and the carriage rolled away in the darkness, he spoke to her, somewhat puzzled:
"I should be sorry to think the American Ambassador has been taking too much wine--as you well know, my knowledge of the barbarous English tongue is but limited, and yet--I thought, as I joined you, he was talking some farrago of nonsense about a _Yellow Cat_!"
That year the Yellow Cat came home lean and gaunt, a chastened, humble creature, as one who has failed in a long quest, and is glad to stretch his weary length before the hearth and reap the neglected benefits of the domestic life.
"It is really very odd" said the minister, quite as if he were saying something he had never thought of saying before, "where that cat goes in the summer!"
"Isn't it?" responded the minister's wife--just as she always did. "It fires the imagination! He walks off some fine morning and completely shuts the door on our life here--as if he gave us notice not to pry into his movements. But this time"--she was leaning to stroke the tawny sides with a pitying touch--"this time you may be sure something very sad and disappointing happened to him--something in that other life went quite wrong! How I wish we could understand what it was!"