She welcomed him in a little boudoir that had been fitted up for her on the ground floor. Lace and buhl-work, crystal and dainty china, were all about her. On the walls were sombre, amorous pictures, winking in the glassy shine from girandoles. A decanter and goblets stood on a gilded whisp of a table under a mirror, and hard by a tiny brown spaniel lay asleep on a cushion. She might have been own sister to this whelp from the curl and colour of her hair.
On this she wore no powder, but only a diamond star and loop in emphasis of its loveliness. She was dressed without ostentation, yet every knot and frill were disposed in a manner to suggest the liberal beauty of her figure. But she had, in truth, no need of artifice to show her radiant in the eyes of gods and men.
Now, looking at her, Ned thought, “How in this short time has she renewed herself from that haunting ghost that possessed me on the Liége road? There is something uncanny in this resurrection: I apprehend the ‘seven devils’ must have entered into her.”
And he felt a little discomfortable, as if he were at last brought into acute antagonism with a force that he had hitherto despised for the vanity of its pretensions.
She took his hands and looked into his face. There was a strange yearning inquiry in her eyes. This very licence of touch, so inappropriate to their cold relations one with the other, put him on his guard, though he would not at the moment resent it.
“You knew I was there, at Dover?” she said. “Ah! I sorrowed for your wound, mon ami; but I could not come. Monseigneur would not let me; the chevalier would not let me.”
“Never mind that,” said Ned, withdrawing his hands. “It only concerns me that you have been consistent to your promise, and that my lord attaches, in your person, another scandal to his record.”
“But that is not true,” she said, shrugging her shoulders; “and, even though it were, will not your philosophy condone it? Little holy Mother! is it that such as you, and he—that other of Méricourt—would use Liberty only as your pander, disowning her when she has served her purpose!”
She was all too young in vice as yet to play, without some real emotion, the part she had elected to fill.
“He taught me from his devil’s gospels!” she cried; “and you saw, and would not interfere, because your faith was the same as his.”