She reached up her slender hand and put her fingers upon his mouth:
“Hush!” said she—“let us back to our books and rejoice in our lack of wisdom. We were happier with our curios and the mysteries.... I am done with him.”
And all about them the little fat Eastern idols sadly smiled and smiled....
The poet never recovered from the blow. He felt that through his conceit alone his girl had been bought. He would harp upon it sadly. She laughed always her soft low laugh at all his self-blame, purring of her love for him. But Solignac was a disillusioned man—thought the world wagged chins at him—lost heart—stooped beneath the secret shame of the blow. The blunder about his girl’s marriage killed him....
As he lay still and cold upon his white bed, at midnight, the great candles flaming in their high brass candlesticks, idols of the East gazing sadly down upon him, the girl, who had flung herself beside the bed, her bowed head on his chill unanswering hand, of a sudden ceased her sobbing and stood up. She bit her finger tips upon the urging of some sudden mood, gazing stealthily about the room. She was alone.
She walked, with strange catlike tread, to an exquisite lacquer cabinet; opened the lock, and lifting the lid, took out a red Japanese fan.
She went to the dead man’s bookshelves and took down Solignac’s last volume of sonnets—the pages were uncut.
She sat down at the foot of the bed. How often she had so sat as a child! He had had such pride in her!
The high flames of the great altar candles flooding her with their light, cast shadows down upon her where she crouched over the book.
She gripped the handle of the fan in her long supple fingers and plucked a bright blade from out the cunningly wrought scabbard—the fan had only been in the outward seeming, most wondrously carved.