"My mother has died, and she asked me to look for her. I want to keep my promise that I would. No one knows where my sister is, Arnedo. Do me a kindness and tell me."
"I don't know where she is. If I find out...."
As they parted, they shook hands. Arnedo was beginning to understand Monsalvat. He knew that this man, who seemed to have forgotten the scene in the cabaret, was no coward; that there was in him something that he had known in no one else. He went with Fernando to the elevator and again shook hands with him.
Monsalvat found Torres in his office. In order not to add to his friend's shame and grief, the doctor listened without looking up. Monsalvat had found it easy enough to speak of his sister to Arnedo; but to speak of her to Torres—what an effort it cost him! And he had something even harder to do; he must tell him he was also looking for Nacha. Torres would think that he was in love with the girl, and perhaps laugh. Yet, when Monsalvat, with a tremendous effort, told him that there was need of finding Nacha, too, Torres gravely replied that Nacha must be found.
For he, too, was beginning to understand Monsalvat.
CHAPTER X
The boarding house to which Nacha had fled belonged to an old maid of French extraction known as Mlle. Dupont. This elderly landlady quite won Nacha's heart with her amiability and delicate ways, her politeness and her unquestionable respectability. Poor Nacha had never in her whole life been so well treated; the years she had last lived through had prepared her to be particularly surprised and pleased by the attentions with which she now found herself surrounded. She attributed to kindliness and goodness of heart the courtesies which were due to "Mademoiselle's" punctilious ceremoniousness; and she thought that her landlady did her a great honor in demonstrating so much affection for her.
As a matter of fact, Mlle. Dupont had as many wrinkles in her soul as on her face. Her apparent amiability expressed itself chiefly in certain phrases of endearment or pity such as ma petite, ma chérie, Oh, quel malheur! and others of the same nature. To hear her, one might have thought that to this sensitive being everything was delicious, enchanting, exquisite, worthy of compassion or sympathy. The daughter of Bayonne Protestants, she had turned Catholic, and was, at bottom, a narrow, egotistic, rather ridiculous old woman. She treated all her boarders as she treated Nacha, and was prodigal to them of similar amenities. She must have been about forty-five; but she looked more than fifty. She was tall, angular, stiff in her movements, with masculine features, and hair and eyebrows of a reddish cast. Her nose was sharply molded, and her hair, combed high in an ancient style, covering the greater part of her forehead and her ears, and hanging down the sides in ringlets that were not always in curl, gave her a somewhat ludicrous appearance. When she wished to appear particularly sweet-natured, she would lean ceremoniously toward the person addressing her, all the while smiling and blinking her small eyes.
Mlle. Dupont would quite frequently visit Nacha in her room.