“Of a truth,” she replied, “they cannot have been to your stomach at all. You asked for bread, was it not, and they gave you a shower of stones? One does not desire one’s high convictions to be set up for a mark to violence. And so you turned the tail and came home to our dear monseigneur.”
“I have come home to England,” said Ned. “As to this, my happening on my lord, it is a simple accident.”
He spoke with some coldness of reserve. He had no idea whom he addressed. His kinsman had disdained to introduce him or to give him the least clue to madame’s identity.
The lady laughed again.
“But do not call it a contretemps!” she cried. “It is a dispensation of Providence that milord, though a very Bayard of courage, is detained by sentiments of chivalry. We were to have journeyed to Paris together had news of the riots not reached us; and hence arrives this so amiable meeting.”
“I was there,” said Ned shortly. “I saw M. Reveillon’s factory gutted.”
She paused in her fanning. She looked strangely at the young man a moment.
“You were there?” Then she resumed her bantering tone: “and found what bad bed-fellows are theory and practice. Perhaps it shall reconcile you to milord here, whose rôle of orthodox muscadin you shall for the henceforth make your own.”
“Egad!” cried the viscount, who, it seemed, accepted the revolutionary muscadin for better than it was worth. “But I had my fill of riots in ’80, when the cursed rabble took me for a papist and singed my coat-tails.”
Madame nodded her head brightly. Her dark eyes contrasted as startlingly with her overlaid cheeks as might the eyes in a face of wax.