The guard was engraved with a cartouche enclosing the Three Graces; and from it sprang a beautiful counter-guard formed out of two lovely Caryatids united. The grip was made of heliotrope amethyst inset with gold; the pommel constructed by two volutes which encompassed a tiny naked nymph with emeralds for her eyes.
"What a masterpiece!" she breathed. "It can be matched only in the Royal Armoury of Madrid."
"Yes, several times with my father. It was part of my education in business."
"He must have been a very cultivated man."
"Perhaps," he said, "there once was a _de_ written before 'Nevers.'"
She laughed: "No. Father's family were always bourgeois shopkeepers--as I am."
He looked at the dainty girl beside him, with her features and slender limbs and bearing of an aristocrat.
"Too bad," he said, pretending disillusion. "I expected you'd tell me how your ancestors died on the scaffold, remarking in laudable chorus, '_Vive le Roi!_'"
She laughed and sparkled deliciously: "Alas, no, monsieur. But, _ma foi!_ Some among them may have worked the guillotine for Sanson or drummed for Santerre.
"You seem to me to symbolise all the grace and charm that perished on the Place de Grève."
She laughed: "Look again, and see if it is not their Nemesis I more closely resemble."
And as she said it so gaily, an odd idea struck him that she _did_ embody something less obvious, something more vital, than the symbol of an aristocratic régime perishing en masse against the blood-red sky of Paris.
He did not know what it was about her that seemed to symbolise all that is forever young and fresh and imperishable. Perhaps it was only the evolution of the real world he saw in her opening into blossom and disclosing such as she to justify the darkness and woe of the long travail.
She had left him standing alone with Grenville's book open in his hands, and was now examining a figure wearing a coat of fine steel mail, with a black corselet protecting back and breast decorated with _horizontal_ bands.
"Do you notice the difference?" she asked. "In German armour the bands are vertical. This is Milanese, and I think the Negrolis made it. See how exquisitely the morion is decorated with these lions' heads in gold for cheek pieces, and these bands of gold damascene over the skull-piece, that meet to form Minerva's face above the brow! I'm sure it's the Negrolis work. Wait! Ah, here is the inscription! 'P. Iacobi et Fratr Negroli Faciebant MDXXXIX.' Bring me Grenville's book, please."