“My dear, what is true? You have been thinking such strange things!” said Lady Forwood, distressed and worried, for she loved the unhappy little creature. “You have got some silly notions into your head, and you imagine all sorts of nonsense.”
“Listen!” said Mercedes, glancing round and speaking low. “To-day he told me that he and the count would go on the river. I had to go to the Court alone. Well, I thought I would ask the ambassadress to take me—it would be not so long—she has the entrée, as you call it. She did take me. Coming back, my carriage got into a number of other carriages, and I saw—him.”
“The prince? Well, why not?” asked Lady Forwood.
“I saw him—and her—the woman whose portrait I found!” said Mercedes, in a tone of anguish.
“Well, my dear,”—Lady Forwood spoke in a matter-of-fact manner, although she was anathematising the prince for his flagrant conduct in being publicly seen with the beautiful French actress whose name had been coupled with his in society gossip—“I daresay he will be able to explain it all to you, if, indeed, you were not mistaken.”
“How—explain?” asked Mercedes, bitterly. “How explain a lie, mammy?”
“Hush!” said Lady Forwood, uneasily. “My dear, I never should have worried David if I had seen him with fifty women!”
“That—is different!” said the princess. “Mammy, you love each other!”
Lady Forwood began a brisk lecture:
“My child, you are not fit to be out in the world at all,” she said. “You ought to have come to me for a year’s instruction before you were married, instead of going straight to the altar from the convent. You know absolutely nothing about men. Men’s ways are not women’s ways. The world allows them their liberty; and if their wives don’t allow it them also, they will neglect their wives for the world, and the wives will be to blame.”