And then they all trouped to the large table in
this huge dining-hall.
Tamara sat on her host's right hand, and Princess Sonia on his left.
To-night his coat was brown and the underdress black, it was quite as
becoming as the others she had seen him in, with the strange belt and
gold and silver trimmings and the Eastern hang of it all, and his great
dark gray-blue eyes blazed at Tamara now and then with a challenge in
them she could hardly withstand.
"Now tell us, Gritzko, what did you do in Egypt this year?" Princess
Sonia said. "It is the first time that no histories of your ways have
come to our ears--were you ill?--or bored? We feared you were dead."
"On the contrary, I was greatly alive," he answered gravely. "I was
studying mummies and falling in love with the Sphinx. And just at the
end I had a most interesting kind of experience; I came upon what
looked like a woman, but turned out to be a mummy and later froze into
a block of ice!"
"Gritzko!" they called in chorus. "Can anyone invent such impossible
stories as you!"
"I assure you I am speaking the truth. Is it not so, Madame?" And he
looked at Tamara and smiled with fleeting merry mockery in his eyes.
"See," and he again turned to his guests, "Madame has been in Egypt she
tells me, and should be able to vouch for my truth."
Tamara pulled herself together.
"I think the Sphinx must have cast a spell over you, Prince," she said,
"so that you could not distinguish the real from the false.
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