He obeyed the first direction and then set about carrying out the second.
“What would you do, my darling, if you had to give up your pretty house, your rooms full of flowers, your dainty marble bath, your French frocks and your crowds of visitors?”
Her reply was prompt and crushing, spoken with passionate conviction. “I should die.” Then she turned upon him in alarmed eagerness: “What has happened that I should give them up? They are my own, they are natural to me; it is not right that the granddaughter of a Maharajah should be without these things!”
“But supposing you found out that you were enjoying them at the expense of others who had a better right to them still, who were born to them, and had to go without them for your pleasure. Oh, Nouna, you have a generous little heart, you would not bear that!”
She shook her head incredulously.
“You forget,” said she, “it was through my mother that my fortune came to me. Mamma would never do anything that was not right and just. What she says is mine, that I may enjoy without fear of wrong.”
She was secure now behind the rampart of her religion, and he perceived that he could only convert her through the mother she adored. So he let the subject drop, inwardly deciding that his next move, after seeing Lord Florencecourt, must be to find out where Madame di Valdestillas and her husband were staying, and come to an understanding with that lady as to the duties owed by a woman to her daughter’s husband as well as to her own.
Determined not to trouble his wife again with premature hints of such a desolating kind that she had already burst open her dressing-bag to shed tears over the portable evidence of her accession to fortune—her diamonds—he spoke of indifferent things, and asked, for want of something better, if she knew what had become of Dicky Wood since he left Maple Lodge a few days before they did. Nouna’s face seemed suddenly to contract, and she darted at her husband a curiously cautious glance, shifting immediately back to the contents of her bag.
“I’m afraid—” she began. “They say he has got back into the power of—of that woman, you know,” she ended with a nod, seeing a cloud form upon her husband’s face which forbade her to let the name of such a person pass her lips.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said he, being indeed more grieved at his wife’s knowledge of and interest in the affair than at the foolish boy’s falling again into the hot water out of which he had been once so thoughtfully fished.