"Ste. Marie," she said, "why did you never fall in love with me, as the other men did?"
"I wonder!" said he. "I don't know. Upon my word, I really don't know."
He was so serious about it that the girl burst into a shriek of laughter. And in the end he laughed, too.
"I expect it was because I liked you too well," he said, at last. "But come! We're forgetting my lecture. Listen to your grandpère Ste. Marie! I have heard--certain things--rumors--what you will. Perhaps they are foolish lies, and I hope they are. But if not, if the fear I saw in Stewart's face when you came here to-night, was--not without cause, let me beg you to have a care. You're much too savage, my dear child. Don't be so foolish as to--well, turn comedy into the other thing. In the first place, it's not worth while, and, in the second place, it recoils always. Revenge may be sweet. I don't know. But nowadays, with police courts and all that, it entails much more subsequent annoyance than it is worth. Be wise, Olga!"
"Some things, Ste. Marie," said the golden lady, "are worth all the consequences that may follow them."
She watched Captain Stewart across the room, where he stood chatting with a little group of people, and her beautiful face was as hard as marble and her eyes were as dark as a stormy night, and her mouth, for an instant, was almost like an animal's mouth--cruel and relentless.
Ste. Marie saw, and he began to be a bit alarmed in good earnest. In his warning he had spoken rather more seriously than he felt the occasion demanded, but he began at last to wonder if the occasion was not in reality very serious, indeed. He was sure, of course, that Olga Nilssen had come here on this evening to annoy Captain Stewart in some fashion. As he put it to himself, she probably meant to "make a row," and he would not have been in the least surprised if she had made it in the beginning, upon her very dramatic entrance. Nothing more calamitous than that had occurred to him. But when he saw the woman's face turned a little away and gazing fixedly at Captain Stewart, he began to be aware that there was tragedy very near him--or all the makings of it.
Mlle. Nilssen turned back to him. Her face was still hard, and her eyes dark and narrowed with their oddly Oriental look. She bent her shoulders together for an instant and her hands moved slowly in her lap, stretching out before her in a gesture very like a cat's when it wakes from sleep and yawns and extends its claws, as if to make sure that they are still there and ready for use.
"I feel a little like Samson to-night," she said. "I am tired of almost everything, and I should like very much to pull the world down on top of me and kill everybody in it--except you, Ste. Marie, dear; except you!--and be crushed under the ruins!"
"I think," said Ste. Marie, practically--and the speech sounded rather like one of Hartley's speeches--"I think it was not quite the world that Samson pulled down, but a temple--or a palace--something of that kind."