The attitude of this woman and her eagerness to guess from the gestures of her daughter and Henri what was passing between them, were suddenly explained to the young man; and this explanation put him at his ease.
“Paquita,” he said, “are we never to be free then?”
“Never,” she said, with an air of sadness. “Even now we have but a few days before us.”
She lowered her eyes, looked at and counted with her right hand on the fingers of her left, revealing so the most beautiful hands which Henri had ever seen.
“One, two, three——”
She counted up to twelve.
“Yes,” she said, “we have twelve days.”
“And after?”
“After,” she said, showing the absorption of a weak woman before the executioner’s axe, and slain in advance, as it were, by a fear which stripped her of that magnificent energy which Nature seemed to have bestowed upon her only to aggrandize pleasure and convert the most vulgar delights into endless poems. “After——” she repeated. Her eyes took a fixed stare; she seemed to contemplate a threatening object far away.
“I do not know,” she said.