"Old-fashioned people shook their heads and fore-told all sorts of trouble for the little butterfly that fluttered so near to the flame which every one supposed was burning perpetually in Collingwood's heart.
"About this time Lady Attwill returned to England and sought out George Admaston. What she did quite upset the calculations of the people who talk. She became very attentive to George, and yet, at the same time, managed to get about a good bit with Peggy. In fact, she seemed in a sort of way to console Admaston and to be encouraging his wife. Society has been perplexed by the whole business for a considerable time. No one knows what to make of the position. They all met, for instance, at Ellerdine's for the shooting. Admaston ran down for a week-end only. Then during the late winter, after a long autumn session, rumours flew thick and fast, and everybody seemed to be waiting for the storm to break. Why there should be a storm nobody really seemed to know. Collingwood and Peggy have been talked about to the exclusion of almost every other subject. They're talked about now. London and the Faubourg Saint Honoré is buzzing with them. And here, my dear Passhe, you and I away up at the Tuileries for a merry week of theatres in Paris, and we find Peggy staying here and Collingwood, too, by Jove!—what! what! Damn it, Passhe, you're asleep!"
A long-drawn and not entirely unmelodious snore proclaimed that Colonel Adams's long recital had somewhat wearied the civilian, who was not "in society."
CHAPTER II
Mrs. Admaston's sitting-room at the Hôtel des Tuileries was a large and beautiful apartment, one of the best in the hotel. Save for the long French windows, which were now, at midnight, covered with curtains of green tussore silk, there was nothing distinctively foreign about the room. The best French hotels nowadays have all adopted English and American standards of comfort. The stove, the uncarpeted and slippery parquet floor, the impossible chairs, and a ceiling painted to resemble a nightmare of a fruiterer's shop, are all things of the past.
Electric lights in softly shaded globes threw a pleasant yellow radiance over everything. A fire of cedarwood logs glowed on the tiled hearth, and a great bunch of lilac stood in a copper bowl upon a small mahogany table which was placed between two doors which faced the one leading to Mrs. Admaston's bedroom.
Some tall silver candlesticks stood upon the Broadwood piano; and there were others, in which the candles were not lit, upon brackets on either side of the telephone.
It was just upon midnight when the door of Mrs. Admaston's bedroom opened and her confidential maid and companion came into the room. Pauline Toché was a woman of some forty years of age. Her black hair streaked with grey was drawn tightly back from her forehead. The face, a little hard and watchful perhaps, nevertheless showed signs of marked intelligence. The eyes had something of the ferocity but also the fidelity of a well-trained watch-dog. She was dressed unassumingly enough in black, and she wore an apron also of some black material.
Such a face and figure may be seen a dozen times in any Breton village, and more than once her friends had said to Mrs. Admaston that Pauline seemed to require the coif of her country—the snowy white and goffered col which is worn over the shoulders; a pair of sabots even!