(3)
The Comtesse Armand de la Roche-Guyon had gathered in her boudoir all the relics that she cared to preserve of Horatia Grenville, and in the place of honour on the mantelpiece stood a silhouette of her father as a young man, gazing straight in front of him with the spirited yet stony gaze of its kind. And, having locked the door, Horatia went almost mechanically towards it, and flinging herself down in the chair, gave way to a tempest of tears—tears of rage, humiliation, and the bitterest disappointment.
While she had, unaided, put on this dress this afternoon, her hands shaking with excitement, she had acted over the scene. Armand would very naturally be surprised at her request, would raise objections perhaps, but in the end—or at the beginning, for the matter of that—he would ask her why she was so set on going to Kerfontaine. And then she would tell him her secret....
And this was the realisation of that dream, this was the shallow pool to which all the sea of rapture of the past had shrunk! "I love him—I have given him everything—I am to bear his child, and he thinks more of his friends' laughter than of me...." No use to fight that tiny doubt that had been growing lately in her heart, that he did not love her as she loved him.... But what did that matter, doubt or certainty, for she did not love him any more. "I shall not tell him now," was her thought, joined with that other, half vengeful, half wistful, "Ah, if he only knew!"
She looked up with swimming eyes at the silhouette on the mantelpiece. What was her father doing, poor darling, without her? Oh, if she could only have gone with her news to him! A passion of home-sickness came over her; she was indeed alone in a strange land. She had always known that she was setting out into exile, but by Armand's side it could never have been real banishment. Now...
A quarter of an hour later she passed into her bedroom, and, without ringing for her maid, took off her dress, resolving that she would never wear it again, bathed her eyes, put on a négligé and returned to her boudoir. Then, with an heroic attempt at self-discipline, she selected a stiff book from the case and sat down to read it.
(4)
M. le Comte de la Roche-Guyon, when his wife's boudoir door was shut in his face, gave a philosophical little shrug of his shoulders and turned away without more ado. He proceeded to his own apartment, made some changes in his attire, and taking up the book for Madame de Vigerie, set out forthwith to bear it to that lady, trusting that on his return the sky would have cleared.
He did not, however, reach her house in the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, for under the chestnut trees in the Tuileries garden he happened upon the Vicomtesse herself, seated with two other ladies upon the straw-bottomed chairs that stood there. He sat down beside her, and, her companions being for the moment engrossed with their own conversation, was able to say to her unheard,
"I was coming to see you. I have got your book."