He looked at her curiously.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said, “and how you come to be here alone.”
She put her hands behind her back; the mantle trailed over her train and her fragile dress glimmered in the shade.
“It was after the opera at Versailles,” she began. “I was dressed for the ballet and was leaving my dressing-room, when they put a cloak over my head and carried me out to a coach–we drove all night to the house of an English lord in the Rue de Vaugirard—”
She stepped suddenly and noiselessly behind the Duke.
“—as I was descending from the coach they put a handkerchief over my eyes, so—”
Philip Wharton felt a scrap of muslin flung over his head and drawn tight over his eyes, leaving him in pleasant darkness.
“—and one led me by the hand, thus—”
Her fingers touched his; he smiled passively beneath the bandage.
“—and took me into the presence of my lord, who had betted a thousand guineas that I should ride in his cabriolet through Paris. But it was not very long before he was tired of me.”