“Than to die of love?” he asked, and met her eyes; “that were easier than to live without it.”
“Chut!––you speak like the cavalier of a romance.”
“I feel like one,” he confessed, “and it rests on your mercy whether the romance has a happy ending.”
She flashed one admonishing glance at him and towards the woman who bent over his hand.
“Oh, she does not comprehend the English,” he assured her; “and if she does she will only hear the echo of what she reads in my hand.”
“Proceed,” said the Marquise to the Egyptian, “we wait to hear the list of Monsieur’s romances.”
“You will live by the sword, but not die by the sword,” said the woman. “You will have one great passion in your life. Twice the woman will come in your path. The first time you will cross the seas to her, the second time she comes to you––and––ah!––”
She reached again for the hand of the Marquise and compared 72 them. The two young people looked, not at her, but at each other.
In the eyes of the Marquise was a certain petulant rebellion, and in his the appealing, the assuring, the ardent gaze that met and answered her.
“It is peculiar––this,” continued the woman. “I have never seen anything like it before; the same mark, the same, Mademoiselle, Monsieur; you will each know tragedies in your experience, and the lives are linked together.”