"You seem to be on very confidential terms with Mademoiselle."
"Yes," she answered, looking at me with quiet defiance.
"Is the confidence mutual, Isabella?" asked I, rising to go; and received no answer.
When I bade good-night to Madame de Clericy, she was standing alone at the far end of the room.
"Ah! mon ami," she said, as she gave me her hand, "I think you are blinder than other men. Women are not only clothes. We have feelings of our own, which spring up without the help of any man—in despite of any, perhaps—remember that."
Which I confess was Greek to me, and sent me on my way with the feeling of a hunter who, in following one all-absorbing quarry through the forest, and hearing on all sides a suppressed rustle or hushed movement, pauses to wonder whence they come and what they mean.
"Tell me," said Alphonse, who helped me with my heavy coat, "if you have news of Miste or propose to follow him. I will accompany you."
He said it awkwardly, after the manner of one avowing an unworthy suspicion of which he is ashamed. So Alphonse Giraud was to follow me and watch my every movement, treating me like a servant unworthy of trust. I made answer, promising to advise him of any such intention; for Giraud's company was pleasant under any circumstances, and there would be some keen sport in running Miste to earth with him beside me.
Thus I came away from Isabella's house with the conviction that she and no other was my most active enemy. It was Isabella who had poisoned Giraud's mind against me. He was too simple and honest to have conceived unaided such thoughts as he now harboured. Moreover, he was, like many good-hearted people, at the mercy of every wind that blows, and, like the chameleon, took his colour from his environments.
It was to no other than Isabella that I owed Lucille's coldness, and I shrewdly suspected some ulterior motive in the action that transferred the home of the distressed ladies—for a time at least—from my house at Hopton to her own house in London. Madame de Clericy and Lucille were no longer my guests, but hers; and each day diminished their debt towards me and made them more beholden to Isabella.