Babylas, vanish!" And he waved the scribbler doorwards with a contemptuous hand.
"Take your papers with you--into my closet there.

We will resume that letter to Her Majesty when madame shall have left me." The secretary gathered up his papers, his quills, and his inkhorn, and went his way, accounting the end of the world at hand.
When the door had closed upon him, the Seneschal, with another bow and a simper, placed a chair at his visitor's disposal.

She looked at the chair, then looked at the man much as she had looked at the chair, and turning her back contemptuously on both, she sauntered towards the fireplace.

She stood before the blaze, with her whip tucked under her arm, drawing off her stout riding-gloves.

She was a tall, splendidly proportioned woman, of a superb beauty of countenance, for all that she was well past the spring of life.
In the waning light of that October afternoon none would have guessed her age to be so much as thirty, though in the sunlight you might have set it at a little more.