“Not trusted!” the Princess repeated, with her splendid stare. “Why, I thought I could be hanged to-morrow!”
“They may let you hang, perfectly, without letting you act. You are liable to be weary of us,” Paul Muniment went on; “and, indeed, I think you are weary of us already.”
“Ah, you must be a first-rate man—you are such a brute!” replied the Princess, who noticed, as she had noticed before, that he pronounced ‘weary’ weery.
“I didn’t say you were weary of me,” said Muniment, blushing again. “You can never live poor—you don’t begin to know the meaning of it.”
“Oh, no, I am not tired of you,” the Princess returned, in a strange tone. “In a moment you will make me cry with passion, and no man has done that for years. I was very poor when I was a girl,” she added, in a different manner. “You yourself recognised it just now, in speaking of the insignificant character of my fortune.”
“It had to be a fortune, to be insignificant,” said Muniment, smiling. “You will go back to your husband!”
To this declaration she made no answer whatever; she only sat looking at him in a sort of desperate calmness. “I don’t see, after all, why they trust you more than they trust me,” she remarked.
“I am not sure that they do,” said Muniment. “I have heard something this evening which suggests that.”
“And may one know what it is?”
“A communication which I should have expected to be made through me has been made through another person.”