"Safest, no doubt." Madame de Vallorbes' eyes were bent on the crystal sphere again. "As it is safer to decline a duel, than go out and meet your man. Best? On that point you must permit me to hold my own opinion. The word best has many readings according to the connection in which it is employed. Personally I should always fight."
"Whatever the odds?"
"Whatever the odds."—And almost immediately Madame de Vallorbes uttered a little cry, curiously at variance with her bold words. "Something is moving inside the crystal, something is coming. I don't half like it, Richard. Perhaps we are tempting Providence. Yes, it moves, it moves, like mist rising off a river. It is poisonous. Some woman has looked into this before—a woman of my temperament—and read an evil fortune. I know it. Tell me quick, how did the crystal come here, to whom did it belong?"
"To Mary Stuart—Mary, Queen of Scots," Dickie said.
"Ah! unhappy woman, ill-omened woman. You should have told me that before and I would never have looked. Here take it, take it. Lock it up, hide it. Let no woman ever look in it again."
As she spoke Helen crossed herself hastily, pushing the magic ball towards him. But, as though endowed with life and volition of its own—or was it merely that Dick's hand was even yet not quite of the steadiest?—it evaded his grasp, fell off the table edge and rolled, gleaming moonlike, far across the floor, away behind the pedestal of the bronze Pompeian Antinous, into the dusky shadow of those ghostly-waving, turquoise, satin curtains.
With a sense of catastrophe upon her Helen had sprung to her feet.—Even now, standing in the peaceful warmth of the autumn sunshine, among the feeding pea-fowl, the remembrance of it caused her a little shiver. For at sight of that gleaming ball hurrying across the carpet, all the nervousness, the distrust of herself, the vague spiritual alarms, which had beset her on first entering the room, returned on her with tenfold force. The superstitious terrors of the convent-bred girl mastered the light-hearted scepticism of the woman of the world, and regions of sinister possibility seemed disclosing themselves around her.
"Oh! how horrible! What does it mean?" she cried.
And Richard answered cheerily, somewhat astonished at her agitation, trying to reassure her.
"Mean? Nothing, except that I was abominably awkward and the crystal abominably slippery. What does it matter? We can find it again directly."