"Ste. Marie offered only too many fatally magical quarters of an hour. They are both very hopelessly far gone, the two poor innocents!"
"Both? But it is preposterous, incredible! Dearest friend, you do not say to me both—not both?" Adrian cried, in a rising scale of heated protest.
To which Anastasia, hailing these symptoms of militant jealousy as altogether healthy, replied genially, taking his arm:
"If you doubt my word, come and judge for yourself."
Lewis Byewater, his hands clasped behind him, leaned his limp height against one of the few wall-spaces unincrusted with pictures, mirrors, china and other liberal confusion of ornament. Madame St. Leger stood near him, smoothing out the wrinkles in the wrists of her long gloves. To Adrian, as he entered the room, her charming person presented itself in profile. He perceived, and this gave him a curious turn in the blood, half of subtle alarm, half of high promise, that she once more wore colors.
Anastasia Beauchamp felt his arm tremble.
"Yes," she murmured, "a certain enchanting woman puts on her armor and takes the field again. Believe me, it is time, high time, you came back!"
"You are so very good to try to spare me the pain of making Mr. Stacpole a refusal," Gabrielle was saying sweetly to the young American. "But you do always show yourself so very amiable, so thoughtful I think your countrymen are of the most—how do you say?—the most unselfish of any—"
Turning her head—"Ah!" she exclaimed, quite sharply, living red leaping into the round of her cheeks and living light into her eyes—"it is you, Mr. Savage?"
But even while the answering light leaped into Adrian's eyes, very effectually for the moment dissipating their melancholy, her expression hardened, becoming mocking and ironic.