“Henriette?”
“Yes, Henriette. You had a look of fate. Yes! She was right, too. It was that look which set you apart, more than your beauty. Indeed, you weren’t beautiful then, Marguerite.”
He was gazing at her moodily. The sharp anger had become a sullenness. Marguerite had grown into beauty since those days, but it was not the roseleaf beauty born of days without anxiety and nights without unrest. It was the beauty of one who is haunted by the ghosts of dead dreams and who wakes in the dark hours to weep very silently lest some one overhear. Destined for greater sorrows or perhaps greater joys than fall to the common lot! That was what Henriette had meant! And looking at Marguerite, Gerard, with a little ungenerous throb of pleasure, perceived that at all events the greater joys, if ever they had fallen to her, had faded away long since.
“These have been unhappy years for you, Marguerite,” he said.
“For both of us,” she answered. “How could they have been anything else? Paul had lost everything for which he had striven, whilst I knew that it was I who had caused his loss.”
“But he didn’t lose you.”
“He didn’t have to strive for me,” Marguerite returned, with just the hint of a smile and more than a hint of pride. “I was his from his first call—no, even before he called.”
Gerard could not but remember the first meeting of this tragic couple in the Villa Iris. Paul Ravenel had stood behind Marguerite’s chair, and without a word, without even turning her head to see who it was that stood behind her, she had risen from the midst of the Dagoes and Levantines, as at an order given. She had fallen into step at his side, and no word had as yet passed between them. Gerard de Montignac recollected that, even then, a little pang of jealousy had stabbed him and sharply enough to send him straight out of the cabaret.
“Yes . . . yes,” he said, slowly. “I had never spoken to you then, had I? It wasn’t until afterwards . . .” He was thinking and drawing some queer sort of balm from the thought, that Marguerite had not so much flatly refused him his two days as set her heart on Paul Ravenel before she had met him. If it had been he, for instance, who had stood behind Marguerite’s chair and silently called her! But, then, he hadn’t. He had gone away and left the field clear for Paul Ravenel. Other memories came back to him to assuage his wrath.
“After all, it was I who brought you and Ravenel together,” he said. “For it was I who persuaded him to come with me on that first night to the Villa Iris.”