Claire passed her handkerchief across her eyes to concentrate the picture of fiendish passion that she had seen. Was it possible that imagination had played some trick on her? And yet the picture was as vivid as a landscape picked out and fixed upon the retina by a flash of lightning on a dark night. The girl turned away and hid her white face.
"I should like to meet the artist who drew that face," Anstruther said, with a smile. "One thing I am quite certain of--it is not the work of an Englishman. Well, it has found London something to talk about, and the advertisement is a very clever one. I dare say before long we shall discover that it is exploited in the interest of somebody's soap."
"I am inclined to favor the view that Nostalgo is something novel in the way of a thought-reader or a spiritualist," Jack said. "It seems to me----"
The dining-room door was thrown open by a woman servant, who announced that dinner was served. They passed across the hall into a large dark-walled room, the solitary light of which was afforded by a pair of handsome candelabra on the table. There were not many flowers, but they were all blood red, with a background of shiny, metallic green. The woman who waited passed from one plate to another without making the slightest sign. As she came into the rays of the shaded candles from time to time Jack glanced at her curiously. She was dressed in sombre, lustreless black, with no white showing at all. There was no cap on her head--nothing but a tangle of raven-black hair. Her brows were black and hairy, her skin as dark, so that her faded eyes were in striking contrast to her swarthy appearance. Her hands were very strong and capable, the mouth firm to the verge of cruelty. And yet there was something subdued, something beaten about the woman, as if she had been taken in a wild state and tamed. Anstruther seldom addressed an order to her in words; a motion of the hand, the raising of an eyelid seemed to be sufficient for those pale, tired eyes, which somehow never for one instant relaxed their vigilance.
The woman was a mystery of the house; she seemed to be entirely dominated by her master's will. And yet there were strength and passion there, Jack felt certain. The fanatic only slumbered. A pansy fell from one of the flower vases, and Jack started out his hand to replace it.
"Did you ever see the evil face in the heart of a pansy blossom?" he asked, for there was a pause in the conversation. "It is a demon face--and familiar too. Miss Helmsley, whose face does this saffron heart of the pansy remind you of?"
Claire took the pansy from Jack's hand and studied it with a frown on her pretty face.
"Why, of course," she cried. "I see what you mean. It is Nostalgo, the man with the yellow face."