The visage, so wondrously beautiful in repose, looked almost hideous thus distorted by fury.
She saw Captain Desfrayne put his little note-book back in his pocket, and then heard him say:
“If you will come to me about—say, six or seven o’clock to-morrow evening, at my chambers in”—she missed the name of the street and the number, though she craned her white throat forward eagerly—“I will speak further to you. Do not come before that time, as I shall be absent all day.”
With swift, compassionate fingers he dropped a piece of gold into the thin hand of the unhappy, friendless man before him, and then moved, as if to continue his way.
The superb creature above craned out her head as far as she dared, to watch the two. Captain Desfrayne, however, seemed to be the personage she was specially desirous of following with her keen glances. To her amazement and evident consternation, he walked up to the immediately adjacent house, and rang the bell. The door opened, and he disappeared.
The shabby, half-slouching figure of the supplicant for help shuffled off in the other direction, toward Westbourne Grove, and vanished from out the square.
Releasing her grip of the draperies hanging by the window, the proud and insolent beauty began walking up and down the room, flinging away the paper from which she had been studying.
She looked like some handsome tigress, cramped up in a gilded cage, as she paced to and fro, her dress trailing along the carpet in rich and massive folds. Some almost ungovernable fit of passion appeared to have seized upon her, and she gave way to her impulses as a hot, undisciplined nature might yield.
There was a strange kind of contrast between the feline grace of her movements, the faultless elegance of her perfect toilet, the splendor of her beauty, and the untutored violence of her manner.
“What do they want here?” she asked, half-aloud. “Why do they come here, plotting under my windows? Do they defy me? Do they hope to crush me? What has Paul Desfrayne to complain of? I defy him, as I do Leonardo Gilardoni! Let them do their worst! What are they going to do? Has Leonardo Gilardoni found any—any——”