Later on he made inquiries of his host, with whom he had hunted big game in Africa, and learned that she was a guest in the home of the Russian ambassador. He did not see her again until they met in the south of France a few months later. On this occasion they were guests at the same house, and he took her into dinner. He had not forgotten her, and it gratified him immensely to discover that she remembered him.
That single glance in the duke's house proved to be a fatal one for both. They were married inside of a month. The virile, confident American had conquered where countless suppliants of a more or less noble character had gone down to defeat.
He asked but one question of her; she asked none of him. The fact that she was the intimate friend and associate of the woman in whose home he met her was sufficient proof of her standing in society, although that would have counted for little so far as Brood was concerned.
She was the daughter of a baron; she had spent much of her life in Paris, coming from St Petersburg when a young girl; and she was an orphan with an independent fortune of her own.
Her home in Paris, where she had lived with some degree of permanence for the past four or five years, was shared with an estimable, though impoverished, lady of rank, the Countess de Rochambert, of middle age and undeniable qualifications as a chaperon, even among those who are prone to laugh at locksmiths. Such common details as these came to Brood in the natural way and were not derived from any effort on his part to secure information concerning Mlle Lestrange. Like the burned child, he asked a question which harked back to an unforgotten pain.
“Have you ever loved a man deeply, devotedly, Yvonne—so deeply that there is pain in the thought of him?”
She replied without hesitation.
“There is no such man, James. You may be sure of that.”
“I am confident that I can hold your love against the future, but no man is vital enough to compete with the past. Love doesn't really die, you know. If a man cannot hold a woman's love against all new-comers, he deserves to lose it. It doesn't follow, however, that he can protect himself against the man who appears out of the past and claims his own.”
“You speak as though the past had played you an evil trick,” she said.