"Well, then, milor?" she asked.
"This is a different matter, Mme. la Marquise," he replied calmly, "since it concerns mine own honour and that of my name. Of that honour I claim to be the principal guardian."
Then as she seemed disinclined to vouchsafe a rejoinder he continued, with just a shade more vehemence in his tone:
"The proposal which His Majesty placed before me awhile ago, that same letter which you still hold in your hand, are such vile and noisome things that actual contact with them is pollution. As I see you now with that infamous document between those fingers which I have had the honour to kiss, it seems to me as if you were clutching a hideous and venomous reptile, the very sight of which should have been loathsome to you, and from which I should have wished to see you turn as you would from a slimy toad."
"As you did yourself, milor?" she said with a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders, thinking of his blunder, of the catastrophe which he all but precipitated, and which her more calm diplomacy had perhaps averted.
"As I did, though no doubt very clumsily," he admitted simply, "the moment I grasped its purport to the full. To see you, my wife—yes, my wife," he repeated with unusual firmness in answer to a subtle, indefinable expression which at his words had lit up her face, "to see you pause if only for one brief half hour with that infamy before your eyes, with that vile suggestion reaching and dwelling in your brain the man who made it—be he King of France, I care not—kissing those same fingers which held the abominable thing, was unspeakably horrible in my sight; it brought real physical agony to every one of my senses. I endured it only for so long as etiquette demanded, hoping against hope that every second which went by would witness your cry of indignation, your contempt for that vile and execrable letter which, had you not interposed, I myself would have flung in the lying face of that kingly traitor. But you smiled at him in response; you took the letter from him! My God, I saw you put it in the bosom of your gown!"
He paused a moment, as if ashamed of this outburst of passion, so different to his usual impassiveness. It seemed as if her haughty look, her ill-concealed contempt, was goading him on, beyond the bounds of restraint which he had meant to impose on himself. She no longer now made an attempt to go. She was standing straight before him, leaning slightly back against the portière—a curtain of rich, heavy silk of that subtle brilliant shade, 'twixt a scarlet and a crimson, which is only met with in certain species of geranium.
Against this glowing background her slim, erect figure, stiff with unbendable pride, stood out in vivid relief. The red of the silk cast ardent reflections into her chestnut hair, and against the creamy whiteness of her neck and ear. The sober, almost conventual gray of her gown, the primly folded kerchief at her throat, the billows of lace around the graceful arm formed an exquisite note of tender colour against that glaring geranium red. In one hand she still held the letter, the other rested firmly against the curtain. The head was thrown back, the lips slightly parted and curled in disdain, the eyes—half veiled—looked at him through long fringed lashes.
A picture worthy to inflame the passion of any man. Lord Eglinton, with a mechanical movement of the hand across his forehead, seemed to brush away some painful and persistent thought.
"Nay, do not pause, milor," she said quietly. "Believe me, you interest me vastly."