For a second or two each of them looked away. Sara glanced toward her canaries in their cage. Prince d'Alchingen leant forward to inhale the perfume of some violets in a vase near him.
“Delicious!” he murmured, “delicious!”
“Mr. Disraeli,” said Sara, still gazing at the birds, “has always wished for the marriage with Lady Fitz Rewes. Yet what can we do? I cannot see the end of it.”
“The heroic are plotted against by evil spirits, comforted by good ones, but in no way constrained,” observed the Ambassador; “let us then support Mr. Orange, and wait for his own decision. I doubt whether we could drive him to Lady Fitz Rewes.”
“To whom else?” asked Sara, fastening some flowers in her belt. They were white camellias sent that morning from the infatuated, still hopeful Duke of Marshire. “To whom else—if not Pensée?”
“I dare not answer such questions yet. Have patience and you shall see what you shall see. Much will hinge on the events of the next few days.”
“I will not believe,” she insisted, “that Robert Orange has been deceived by that woman.”
“You may change your opinion. Come to Hadley Lodge next Saturday—I ask no more.”
“Really, sir,” said Sara, with a mocking smile, “you frighten me. Am I at last to fly through an intrigue on the wings of a conspiracy?”
The Prince smiled also, but he saw that the lady had risen to the occasion and would not prove false to her Asiatic blood.