"He it was who found out for me that the poor woman was drowned with whom I had left my boy; there was no clue to the fate of her child nor of mine. Monsieur le Commissaire, with supreme good taste, chose the hour in which he made me this communication, to couple with it a proposal that did not increase my respect for himself or his sex. You may imagine I did not even yet relax my endeavours to find out something certain about my boy. I went to the Mayor, the Préfet; in my desolation, I even wrote to my old admirer, the Manager, in Paris. On all sides I met with the same treatment; civility, compliment, egoism, and utter heartlessness. In time I came to think that there was not only nothing new, but nothing good, under the sun. If I were romantic I should say I was a tigress robbed of her cub; as I am only practical, I call myself simply a woman of the world, whom the world has hardened; cunning, because deceived; pitiless, because ill-treated; heartless, because désillusionée. You have taken me in, and tamed me for a time, but nothing will change my nature now.
"The rest of my history you know; the depths to which I sank, the meannesses of which I was capable, the hypocrisy that re-established me in a station of respectability, and swindled people out of such recommendations as the one that enabled me to make a fool of Sir Henry Hallaton. As I told you before, my motto now is, 'War to the knife!' I might add, 'Woe to the vanquished!'"
The tears stood in her listener's blue eyes more than once during this strange recital; but Mrs. Lascelles brightened up when it was over, and pointed to the clock, with a light laugh—
"Go and put your armour on, my dear," said she, "and bid your maid look to the joints of your harness. We fight to-night in champ clos, and you have two champions to encounter, both eager for the fray!"
Miss Ross smiled—
"Let the best man win!" she answered. "He may find to-night that the 'latter end of a feast' is not at all unlike 'the beginning of a fray!'"
CHAPTER V.
À OUTRANCE.
No Amazon, I imagine, in the experience of Herodotus, Sir Walter Raleigh, or our own, was ever known to be careless of her weapons, suffering them to grow blunt from neglect or rusty from disuse. The boar whets his tusks, the stag sharpens his antlers; the nobler beasts of chase are not dependent for safety on flight alone; and shall not woman study how she can best bring to perfection that armour with which Nature provides her for attack, defence, and eventual capture of her prey?