Page:The City of Masks (1918).djvu/217

Rh formed wonders with pomades and oils and the glossy brilliantine. The sleek black hair of the little Prince shone like the raven's wing; his dark, gipsy eyes, rendered more vivid by the skilful application of "lampblack," gleamed with an ardent excitement; there was colour in his cheeks, and a smile on his lips.

At a table near the platform on which the orchestra was stationed, sat the Honourable Cornelius McFaddan, his wife, and a congenial party of friends. In a far-off corner, remote from the music, you would have discovered the Marchioness and her companions; the bland, perpetually smiling Mr. Hendricks who wrote the book, his wife, and the lovely, blue-eyed Jane.

By a strange order of coincidence, young Mr. Stuyvesant Smith-Parvis, quite mellow and bereft of the power to focus steadily with eye or intellect, occupied a seat,—and frequently a seat and a half,—at a table made up of shrill-voiced young women and bald-headed gentlemen of uncertain age who had a whispering acquaintance with the head waiter and his assistants.

The Countess du Bara, otherwise Corinne, entertained a few of the lesser lights of the Opera and two lean, hungry-looking critics she was cultivating against an hour of need.

At a small, mean table alongside the swinging door through which a procession of waiters constantly streamed on their way from the kitchen, balancing trays at hazardous heights, sat two men who up to this moment have not been mentioned in these revelations. Very ordinary looking persons they were, in business clothes.

One of them, a sallow, liverish individual, divided his