But before he had arrived at his decision, something else happened which was quite outside his programme.
The Prince broke the chilly silence by saying to Nitocris in a tone loud enough for every one to hear: "I hope, Miss Marmion, that I have justified my intrusion by the skill which my friend Phadrig has displayed for the entertainment of your guests ?" She turned and looked at him, and, as their glances met, he saw a change come over her.

Her eyes grew darker: her features acquired an almost stony rigidity utterly strange to her.

His eyelids lifted quickly, and he shrank back from her as a man might do who had seen the wraith of one long dead, but once well known.
"Nitocris!" he murmured in Russian.

"Phadrig was right: it is the Queen!" She swept past him--Oscar Oscarovitch, the man who aspired to the throne of the Eastern Empire of Europe--as though he had been one of his own slaves in the old days, and faced Phadrig.
"It is enough, Anemen-Ha that was.

Hast thou not learned wisdom yet, after so many lives?
Is the inmost chamber of thy soul still closed in rebellion against the precepts of the High Gods?
No more of thy poor little mummeries for the deception of the ignorant! Go, and without further display of the weakness which thou hast presumptuously mistaken for strength.