If Madame Potowski heard this exclamation, it was not tragic to her. She lowered her tone, although there was no one to hear them.
"Tony, I am very anxious about money."
Her nephew laughed aloud. In spite of himself there came over him in a flash the memory of the day nearly ten years ago when she sat on the side of his miserable little bed in his miserable little room in New York and took from him as a loan—which she never meant to pay back—all the money he had in the world. He put his hands in his pockets.
"Has your husband any financial difficulties?"
"My husband knows nothing about it," she said serenely. "You don't suppose I could tell him, do you? I must have five thousand francs, dear Tony, before to-morrow."
Tony said lightly, "I am afraid economy is not your strong point."
"Tony," she exclaimed reproachfully, "I am a wonderful manager; I can make a franc go further than my husband can a louis, and I have a real gift for bargains. Think of it! I only had one hundred dollars a month to dress myself and Bella and poor little Gardiner, and for all my little expenses." The children's names on her lips seemed sacrilege to him. He did not wish her to speak those sacred names, or destroy his sacred past, whose charm and tenderness persisted over all the suffering and which nothing could destroy. "I have been buying a quantity of old Chinese paintings—a great bargain; in ten years they will be worth double the money. You must come and see them. The dealer will deliver them to-morrow."
"History," Antony thought, "how it repeats itself!"
Caroline Potowski leaned toward her nephew persuasively, and even in the softened twilight he saw the weakness and the caprices of her pretty face, and he pitied Potowski.