he would reward her for yielding and he would impress Don Pablo with the fact that only the most famous modistes in the world were worthy to gown a de Cordoba bride.
In Paris, Carmelita, now twenty-three and quite breathlessly beautiful, had met the Hodges—and, under their auspices, Prince Rao-Singh and Dudley Drake.
Lucy Hodge made a specialty of entertaining personages. Prince Rao-Singh, an Indian potentate of, reported, fabulous wealth, educated at Oxford, a tall, dark, suave and somewhat sinister man of thirty-five, of excellent breeding and manners, was the most talked about notable who associated with the wealthy American social colony in Paris. He was a bachelor who seemed to prefer the company of Americans to that of the English or his own people. Lucy, who had at one time boasted confidentially to Carmelita that she could meet anybody in the world, including kings, if she wanted to and flippantly furnished the formula, had cultivated him assiduously because he added a bizarre note to her parties and because his acceptance of her invitations, to the exclusion of so many others, aroused the envy of rival hostesses.
Until the arrival of Carmelita, Prince Rao-Singh, though discharging the social proprieties with scrupulous politeness, for the most
