The words were so delicately murmured that they could not startle her. She only lifted her head like one awaking from sleep and looked slowly about. Seeing Richelieu at her side, and remembering the evening, she suddenly straightened, forced herself back into the present, and began, with an effort: "Pardon, I beg of you, mons—"
"Ah! You to demand pardon of me? Impossible! I am early to-night, dear friend. We have much time. See—you grieve for something—some one. You will confide the grief to me? You will accept my sympathy?"
As Deborah looked for an instant into the large, limpid brown eyes of the man before her, her own fell. Her mood also changed. She was suddenly inclined to be on her guard with this man, whom she knew best as Claude's mentor.
"My grief was for many persons and things. 'Twas for home, my own people, my old friends—there—across the water—" and she pointed whimsically into the cabinet at her former treasures.
Richelieu, with unfeigned curiosity, moved towards the shelf. Picking up one of the bottles, with its neatly written label, he examined it, not very closely, his eyes questioning the girl before him. Deborah, with an absent smile, looked at the crystal phial and its white, oily contents, with the inch of gray sediment at the bottom.
"That is from the Spartium scoparium," she said.
"Really?" muttered Richelieu, considerably puzzled. The turn which the scene was taking, if not as he had planned it, was none the less interesting. "And is this some new cordial or liqueur which you and Claude have discovered together?"
"Heaven forbid!" was the half-laughing, half-serious reply.
"Eh!—You mean—"
"Thirty drops have been fatal. M-medicine and—alkaloids were my tastes, sir, when I had my still-room."