Left alone, the signora rapidly resumed her usual dress, and the directors’ carriage took her back to the hotel where she had stayed since arriving in London. On entering her salon she found Sallenauve, who had preceded her.
“You in London, monsieur!” she said; “it is like a dream!”
“Especially to me,” replied Sallenauve, “who find you here, after searching hopelessly for you in Paris—”
“Did you take that pains?—why?”
“You left me in so strange a manner, and your nature is so rash, you knew so little of Paris, and so many dangers might threaten your inexperience, that I feared for you.”
“Suppose harm did happen to me; I was neither your wife, nor your sister, nor your mistress; I was only your—”
“I thought,” said Sallenauve, hastily, “that you were my friend.”
“I was—under obligation to you,” she replied. “I saw that I was becoming an embarrassment in your new situation. What else could I do but release you from it?”
“Who told you that you were an embarrassment to me? Have I ever said or intimated anything of the kind? Could I not speak to you, as I did, about your professional life without wounding so deeply your sensibility?”
“People feel things as they feel them,” replied Luigia. “I had the inward consciousness that you would rather I were out of your house than in it. My future you had already given me the means to secure; you see for yourself it is opening in a manner that ought to reassure you.”