“Poverino!” Marguerite was meanwhile apostrophizing the ill-tempered bird. “Here, you! Accept this offering gently if you can. It is well meant, and the biscuit is good and sweet! Mille grazie, eccellenze,” she added to Basil. “I am in an Italian mood to-day, as you may perceive. This gracious retreat looks Italian, I think; so do the camellias, and the blue sky over our crystalline dome; so do these little pet vassals of mine; feeding from the hand, as all properly self-respecting vassals should do.”
She tossed the rest of her fistful of seeds to the Bengalis, the gold and green finches, the slim Holland canaries, the redcaps, and twenty other chiefs of tribe whirling around on the sanded floor of their palatial abode to snatch the tempting breakfast from one another.
“They are human,” he harshly commented while following their airy gyrations, “hence quarrelsome and envious, just like Bolingbroke. Too bad that such innocent-looking creatures should have such beastly faults!”
Marguerite seemed suddenly troubled. “Why are you bitter even about trifles?” she queried. “Is that yet another departure from the old state of affairs?”
“Perhaps,” he replied, in a tone that strove in vain to be light. “I must be unlearning fast the art of life as it should be lived. I suppose that with the years one passes from disenchantment to disenchantment. Isn’t that the rule of all down-slope walkers?”
With a quick intake of breath Marguerite swung round toward him, and his heart contracted horribly as he saw that her eyes were wet.
“There is something amiss,” she whispered, bending ever so slightly forward, and stretching her little palms downward as if in swift renunciation of all that she had ever held. “There is something. I knew it. I felt it.... Tell me, Basil ... tell me!”
He had not bargained for this, and he was now dully doubting his own ears. Could this be Marguerite speaking?
“Something amiss?” he repeated after her with would-be emphasis. “Oh, now look here, my dear child, be reasonable, please, and do cease to imagine that I am trying to conceal some catastrophe from you.”
But Marguerite would no longer accept equivocation of any sort.