"Ma soeur, soyez la bienvenue!" he said. "Tu permets, mon cher?"
"Put up your veil," whispered Armand, and when Horatia had thrown back the lace over her bonnet, the tall man kissed her on the cheek. Evidently this was the Marquis Emmanuel.
Armand looked a boy beside him. He had dark hair going grey, a rather melancholy mouth, deeply furrowed at the corners, and eyes that were both troubled and kind.
"I hope that you will be very happy in this house, my sister," he said, with real warmth in his voice. "Our grandmother anxiously awaits the pleasure of your acquaintance, but she thought that you would prefer to repose yourself a little before she receives you."
There was consideration in this decree of the Duchesse's, but also some suggestion of an awful ceremony to come. Horatia thanked her brother-in-law.
"Yes, that will be best," agreed Armand. "Come, mon amie, and we will go to our apartments.—Tudieu Emmanuel, I was forgetting that I had not seen you since August!"
"And you are four months older!" said his brother, in a tone full of delicate implications, as they embraced.
(2)
When Horatia, supported in spirit, and also to a lesser degree in body, by her husband, entered for the first time the apartments of the Duchess Dowager, she knew that she had, in times past, rather over-estimated the strength of her own self-possession. Her knees shook, while biting phrases of his aged kinswoman's, repeated by Armand, came uncomfortably into her mind. However, there was nothing for it; the visit had to be gone through.
Her first impression was that the room was suffocatingly hot; the second, that it was not so large as she had expected; the third, that it had a bed in it—rapidly and not surprisingly following on this, the perception that the Duchesse was receiving, French fashion, in her bedroom. And she had, fourthly, the conviction that Madame la Duchesse Douairière de la Roche-Guyon was the most hideous object that she had ever seen.