“No, I have taken a villa at St. Jean.”
“Is that near here?”
“Very near. You must have skirted the village in driving up here. And has Nice been very gay since we left?”
“No; people have been going away, and we have missed you dreadfully at the opera, and at dances, and at Rumpelmeyer’s. What could have induced you to bury yourself alive in a village?” she asked vivaciously, with that sparkling manner which gives an air of flirtation to the most commonplace talk.
“My wife has been out of health, and it has suited us both to live quietly.”
“Poor Mrs. Ransome—poor you!” exclaimed Miss Darcy, with a sigh. “O, there she is! How do you do, Mrs. Ransome?” gesticulating with a pretty little hand in a long wrinkled tan glove. “Do come and talk to us.”
Mrs. Ransome bowed stiffly, but did not move an inch. She stood picking a branch of rosemary to shreds with nervous restless fingers, scattering the poor pale blue-gray blossoms as if she were sprinkling them upon a corpse. The two girls took no further notice of her, but both bent forward, talking to Ransome, rattling on about this ball and the other ball, and a breakfast, and sundry afternoon teas, and the goings-on—audacious for the most part—of all the smart people at Nice. They had worlds to tell him, having taken it into their heads that he was a humorist, a cynic, who delighted in hearing of the follies of his fellow-man. He stood with his hat off, waiting for the carriage to drive on, inwardly impatient of delay, knowing with what jealous feelings Vivien had always regarded Delia Darcy, dreading a fit of ill-temper when the Irish girls should have vanished by and by below the sandy edge of the common. He listened almost in silence, giving their loquacity no more encouragement than good manners obliged.
“Why don’t you come to the next dance at the Cercle de la Méditerranée?” said Delia coaxingly; “there are so few good dancers left, and your step is just the one that suits me best. There are to be amateur theatricals to begin with—scenes from Much Ado; and I am to be Beatrice. Won’t that tempt you?” she asked, with the insolence of an acknowledged beauty, spoiled by the laxer manners of a foreign settlement, lolling back in the carriage, and smiling at him with brilliant Irish gray eyes, under the shadow of her Leghorn hat, with a great cluster of daffodils just above her forehead, the yellow bloom showing vividly against her dark hair.
The other sister was only a paler reflection of this one, and echoed her speeches, laughing when she laughed.
“Surely you will come to see Delia act Beatrice?” she said. “I can’t tell you how well she does it. Sir Randall Spofforth is the Benedict.”