“Miss Filson,” he said with as simple a dignity as though his name had never been tarnished, as though the gentleman had never decayed into the derelict, “my daughter would be happy to receive you, but she is in no condition to hear startling news. By her own wish, we have not in seven years spoken of Mr. Marston. She does not know that I believed him dead, she does not know that he has reappeared. To tell her would endanger her life.”
“I shall not go as a bearer of news,” the girl assured him; “I shall go only as a friend of her father’s, and—because I want to.”
St. John hesitatingly put out his hand. When the girl gave him hers, he bent over it with a catch in his voice, but a remnant of the grand manner, and kissed her fingers in the fashion of the old days.
Driving with Steele the next morning to St. John’s lodgings, the girl looked straight ahead steadfastly. The rain of the night had been forgotten, and the life of Paris glittered with sun and brilliant abandon. Pleasure-worship and vivacious delight seemed to lie like a spirit of the departed summer on the boulevards. Along the Champs Elysées, from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, flowed a swift, continuous parade of motors, bearing in state gaily dressed women, until the nostrils were filled with a strangely blended odor of gasoline and flowers. The pavement cafés and sidewalks flashed color, and echoed laughter. Nowhere, from the spot where the guillotine had stood to the circle where Napoleon decreed his arch, did there seem a niche for sorrow.
“Will you wait here to see to what he awakens?” questioned Steele.
Duska shook her head.
“I have no right to wait. And yet—yet, I can’t go home!” She leaned toward him, impulsively. “I couldn’t bear going back to Kentucky now,” she added, plaintively; “I couldn’t bear it.”
“You will go to Nice for a while,” said Steele, firmly. He had fallen into the position, of arranging their affairs. Mrs. Horton, distressed in Duska’s distress, found herself helpless to act except upon his direction.
The girl nodded, apathetically.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.