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“Well, they know how to let go, for one thing!”

The curtain rose on ActII, a modern drawing-room in the London home of an English peer, member of ssss1 Parliament, on the occasion of his thirty-ninth birthday. He entered, big, handsome, with his little, clinging English wife.

There was revealed the fact that for generations the oldest male of his line died before the age of forty, a violent death. They married, there were children, and always reaching the prime of manhood, they were cut down. A curse upon his family it seemed to be and the little wife trembled.

Guests dropped in to tea. With them came the announcement that a prominent barrister was bringing a French authoress who had asked to meet their host. She had heard him in the House of Lords. They spoke of her beauty, her extraordinary personality.

Then Mme. Parsinova appeared. In the brilliantly lighted set, the audience had its first good look at her. Slim, with a slenderness that made her seem tall, a mass of pitch-black hair piled high on her small head, a pair of burning eyes, dark and shadowed, creamy skin, a short nose, deep-cleft chin, and scarlet lips full and mobile, she seemed a living flame. She moved forward with gliding step, her lizard-green velvet gown clinging about her limbs, her sable cloak drooping from her shoulders. And one felt at once, as her white hand, weighted with a cabochon emerald, rested in his, the spell she would weave about the insular and very British member of Parliament.