'And yet you would not believe me?'
'Come!' was Unziar's reply.
She laid her hand within his arm and passed silently through the reception rooms beside him.
She felt that the time had come when Unziar could no more be put off by the little wiles and evasions a woman employs who has nothing to give to the man who loves her but a definite answer. Two luxurious chairs stood ready for occupants in the nook to which he led her, but he had no thought to give to conventionalities. He stood before her keen and white, and desperate with doubt.
'Valerie, what does all this mean?'
Though only a girl in years, Valerie was a woman in experience. Experience, not gained altogether at first hand, be it understood, but such as a clever woman easily gathers from the lives of those about her. As the motherless daughter of M. Selpdorf, she had had exceptional opportunities. Thrown into the midst of a brilliant but vicious society, her eyes had seen more of the bare under-texture of life than was perhaps desirable; she had looked upon the shift and drift of things political with an ever-present knowledge that there danger lurked and waited; she had learned the uses of reserve, and something of the art of resource; and, above all, her womanly perceptions had taken on a strange edge of sensitive power, due to her father's quaint methods of pointing out to her the difference between the seeming and the true. By reason of this premature insight into the motives and stress of human existence she gained in safety and strength as her father desired; but on the other hand, she had lost the sense of happy irresponsibility that goes so far towards making up one of the sweetest essentials of youth. Luckily there is one thing which can never be quite destroyed at secondhand—the romance and illusions that beguile boyhood and girlhood, and the liability to be so beguiled still lived in Valerie's strong and vivid nature.
'Shall I swear that every word I spoke to the Duke just now is true?' she asked coldly. 'Although, of course, even that would not convince you!'
'No, I suppose not,' he said drearily. 'You spoke openly of your hope to be maid of honour to Madame de Sagan when she became Duchess of Maäsau—which can only mean one thing. Rallywood heard and told me exactly.'
'You discussed me with Captain Rallywood?' she flashed out.
Unziar's glance darkened again with a new suspicion.