"To the onlookers," Mr. Sabin remarked, "a revolution in this country would possess many interesting features. The common people lack the ferocity of our own rabble, but they are even more determined. I may yet live to see an English Duke earning an honest living in the States."
"It depends very much upon Brott," Lady Carey said. "For his own sake it is a pity that he is in love with Lucille."
"It is," he affirmed, "a most regrettable incident."
She leaned a little towards him. The box was not a large one, and their chairs already touched.
"Your devotion to Lucille, or rather the singleness of your devotion to Lucille," she remarked, "is positively the most gauche thing about you. It is--absolutely callow!"
"Did I not always tell you," he said, "that when I did marry I should make an excellent husband?"
"You are at least," she answered sharply, "a very complaisant one."
The Prince leaned forward from the shadows of the box.
"I invite you all," he said, "to supper with me. It is something of an occasion, this! For I do not think that we shall all meet again just as we are now for a very long time."
"Your invitation," Mr. Sabin remarked, "is most agreeable. But your suggestion is, to say the least of it, nebulous. I do not see what is to prevent your all having supper with me to-morrow evening."
Lady Carey laughed as she rose, and stretched out her hand for her cloak.
"To-morrow evening," she said, "is a long way off. Let us make sure of to-night--before the Prince changes his mind."
"To-night by all means," he declared. "But my invitation remains--a challenge!"
The Prince, being host, arranged the places at his supper-table. Mr. Sabin found himself, therefore, between Lady Carey and a young German attache, whom they had met in the ante-room of the restaurant. Lucille had the Prince and Mr. Brott on either side of her.
Lady Carey monopolised at first the greater part of the conversation. Mr. Sabin was unusually silent. The German attache, whose name was Baron von Opperman, did not speak until the champagne was served, when he threw a bombshell into the midst of the little party.
"I hear," he said, with a broad and seraphic smile, "that in this hotel there has to-day a murder been committed."