"They are getting more jealous of you, I am afraid," said the young man, devouring her face, all aglow from the wind. "Unfasten your furs—let me do it. Not one of them was ever as beautiful as you." His hands shook a little as he unclasped the pelerine of marten skins. "How could they help but be jealous?"
The heavy furs slipped to the ground. "Am I beautiful?" asked Horatia, slim and straight and smiling. "I never used to be." She sat down in the great carved chair in front of the fire, and pulled off her gloves. "Tell me about them; tell me about her." She indicated the portrait over the hearth—the lady in flowing draperies, half reclining in a sylvan landscape, a Louis Quinze Diana, the goddess's crescent moon shining in her close-dressed powdered hair, and on her lips a narrow riddle of a smile that already haunted the newcomer.
"Another day," answered Armand, kneeling beside her. "She is not lucky, my great-great-grandmother. I think I will have her removed from here. Besides, there is only one thing that I can possibly tell you—that I love you, I love you ... and that none of them was ever loved so much!" And, prisoning her hands, he kissed her.
Ancestors and ancestresses round the half-dusk hall looked on unruffled, having seen something like this not once nor twice in the centuries of their vigils, having most of them enacted it themselves—except that young man in wig and cuirass, faintly resembling Armand himself, who fell at Fontenoy before he could bring home his bride. But Roland was disturbed by something outside his comprehension, and getting up, he tried to thrust his nose between the two.
"O, Armand, he is licking me—he is eating me!" protested Horatia, who could not lift a hand to keep off the intruder. "Let me go, dearest; I must change my dress."
"But I like you in your furs," answered Armand, raising his head. His dark blue eyes sparkled. "I thought when we were walking together just now that you should always wear them. They do something—I don't know what—to that incomparable hair of yours." He touched it. "Will you always wear your furs, to please me?"
"Silly boy!" retorted his wife. "And only two or three years ago there was such an outcry against the danger of wearing even cloth dresses instead of muslins indoors! What is more foolish than a man?"
"Nothing, indeed, but a woman," replied the Comte, gazing at her. "Well, I shall at least come and prescribe what you are to wear for me to-night."
"For you, Monsieur!" exclaimed Horatia. "Learn that I dress entirely to please myself! Adieu. Bring my furs." And slipping cleverly from her chair she was round it before he could get from his knees. If she did not actually run full-paced up the great staircase, at any rate she flitted up it with little of the dignity of a new-made wife. Armand, snatching up the pelerine, overtook her three stairs at a time.
(2)