"But Richard—is not that very unfair?" Mrs. Rebell spoke with a fire that surprised herself: "if, as you tell me now, you always knew the truth concerning Bar and Lord Bosworth, should what happened two years ago make such a difference?"
"Till two years ago,"—he spoke as if he had not heard her words,—"Barbara held her own completely; so much is quite clear, and that, mind you, with all the world, even including the strait-laced folk about Chancton. I suppose people were sorry for her—for them both, if it comes to that——Besides, it was nobody's business but their own. Now——" he hesitated: "Daman tells me that she's absolutely solitary, I mean of course as regards the women." He added musingly, as if to himself, "She's acted with extraordinary, with criminal folly over this matter."
"Then she is being treated as we should have been treated,—indeed as we were, by most people, during the short time we stayed in England eight years ago?"
"I do not think," Mr. Rebell spoke very coldly, "that your comparison, Adela, holds good. But now, to-day, the point is this: am I to be compelled to receive, and indeed to countenance, Barbara Sampiero and her lover? and further, am I to allow my wife to do so? Do you suppose"—he spoke with a sudden fierceness,—"that either Barbara or Bosworth would have ever thought of doing what you tell me they have actually written and proposed doing, to-day, had our own circumstances been different? Barbara may be—nay she is, as you very properly point out—a noble and generous creature, but in this matter, my dear Adela, she's behaving ungenerously; she's exacting a price, and a heavy price, for her past kindness. But it is one which after to-day I shall take care she shall not be in a position to exact.
"Yes," he went on slowly, "we shall of course have to give up this house," his eyes glanced with a certain affection round the room which had always pleased his taste. "Our requirements," he concluded, "have become very simple. We might travel, and show our child something of the world."
A light leapt into his wife's eyes; oh! what joy it would be to leave St. Germains, to become for a while nomadic, but with a sigh she returned to the present. "And to-day, what is to happen to-day, Richard? There is no time to stop them—they will be here in two or three hours."
Mr. Rebell remained silent for some moments, and then: "Not even to please you," he said, "can I bring myself to receive them. But I admit the force of what you said just now. Therefore, if you care to do so, stay—stay and make what excuse for my absence seems good to you. Bosworth will know the reason well enough, unless he's more lost to a sense of decency than I take him to be. But Bar—poor dear Bar," a note of unwilling tenderness crept into his cold voice, "will doubtless believe you if you tell her, what indeed is true enough, that I have an important engagement to-day with Daman, and that, if she cares to see me, I will come and see her before she leaves Paris——"
The speaker went to the window and opened it. He bent down and touched Barbara's forehead with his dry lips. "I trust," he said in his thin voice, "that you will have a pleasant birthday. I will bring you back a box of chocolates from Marquis'," and then, without waiting to hear the child's murmured thanks, he turned on his heel and was gone. Barbara did not see her father again till the next morning.
It was early afternoon, and the fair-haired Englishwoman and her little dark, eager-eyed daughter were sitting out on the rose-wreathed balcony of the Villa d'Arcole. Mrs. Rebell was very silent. She was longing for, and yet dreading, the coming meeting with one she had not seen since they had parted, with tears, at Dover, eight long years before. Her restlessness affected the child, the more so that Barbara knew that her marraine, that is to say in English, her godmother, the source of many beautiful gifts, was at last coming to see them, and in her short life the rare coming of a visitor had always been an event.