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 weeping. Even from them the colour suddenly ebbed now. Dead-white her face was between the black pearl and the pink. "And this is the man of whom I dared once for an instant hope that he loved me!"—it was thus that the Duke, quite correctly, interpreted her gaze.

To her and to her mother he gave an inclusive bow as he swept slowly by. Stone was the matron, and stone the maid.

Stone, too, the Emperors over the way; and the more poignantly thereby was the Duke a sight to anguish them, being the very incarnation of what themselves had erst been, or tried to be. But in this bitterness they did not forget their sorrow at his doom. They were in a mood to forgive him the one fault they had ever found in him—his indifference to their Katie. And now—o mirum mirorum—even this one fault was wiped out.

For, stung by memory of a gibe lately cast at him by himself, the Duke had paused and, impulsively looking back into the hall, had beckoned Katie to him; and she had come (she knew not how) to him; and there, standing on the doorstep whose whiteness was the symbol of her love, he—very lightly, it is true, and on the upmost confines of the brow, but quite perceptibly—had kissed her.