The old woman drew her hand away.
"Humph," she muttered with her mouth full of homard. "I wondered if you would see that. It was assassination I escaped. It was enough to leave a mark, eh, mademoiselle?"
"I should think so," I murmured.
The young Count de X. on my right said, in a tone which the duchesse might have heard:
"When she was a young girl, only nineteen, her husband tied her with ropes to her bed and set fire to the bed curtains. Her screams brought the servants and they rescued her."
My fork fell with a clatter.
"What an awful man!" I gasped.
"He was my uncle, mademoiselle!" said the young man, imperturbably, arranging the gardenia in his buttonhole, "but as you say, he was a bad lot."
"I beg your pardon!" I exclaimed.
"It is nothing," he answered. "It is no secret. Everybody knows it."