The doctor, it appeared, however, was to disarm her with a show of the most ingenuous urbanity.
“M. Saint-Péray lodges here?” he said, with a smile like a spasm of stomach-ache. “I should like to have a word with him.”
She looked at him with her honest eyes. It was at least a relief to find that his visit was not connected with his replacement by her father.
“He is not at all himself, monsieur,” she said. “Will not a message suffice?”
“Doubtless,” he answered. “Only I must deliver it myself.”
“A message?”
She questioned his face searchingly. Whose possible delegate could he be? Certainly he and M. Louis were at one in the question of their discomfiture by di Rocco. There was that much of sympathy between them. Besides, it was known that this man dealt in the occult—could cast nativities and foretell deaths. His message might be one of comfort and reassurance. Things were already at such a pass that no conceivable evil could congest them further. A certain awe awoke in her eyes. The neighbourhood of mountains engenders superstition.
“Is your—your message, monsieur,” she said, with a little choke, “from someone—somewhere that only such as you can understand?”
He chafed his bony hands together, leering at her wintrily.
“Yes,” he said. “I think it may interest him.”