“Is this your sister’s hotel, Countess?” he asked.
“No,” she answered; “mine. I told you that I came to Paris to attend the Queen; but I have left that employment. I lead a life of leisure. I am not so often at the Court.”
“Forgive me,” he said, for he felt as if he had asked her for an explanation; “but I thought you wrote to me from the Hôtel Dubussy——”
“I did,” she interrupted. “Madame Dubussy is my sister; but I no longer live there.”
Luc looked at her and smiled.
“Do you know that I passed her house the other night and wondered if you were within? There was a great festival. Some one told me it was the Hôtel Dubussy, but when I saw this house I thought perhaps I had been mistaken.”
Carola drew the slim folds of the red “capuchin” over her stiff skirts.
“You are now in my house, a little outside the Porte St. Antoine. It is rather a lonely part of Paris,” she said. “I have not been to my sister’s house for some weeks.”
Luc did not answer. He liked her measured speech; she was careful with words. His rare dealings with women had taught him that it was an unusual gift in them. Even his mother at times threw words about in a cloud regardless of their meaning, almost of their sense, and he had known little Clémence de Séguy deal in tangled periods that left her panting and worsted by her own language. But Carola used the foreign tongue that was so familiar to her with cautious care; her almost hesitating choice of sentences gave her a marvellous air of sincerity.
“Perhaps,” she continued, “you are wondering why I live here. You used to call me ‘Mademoiselle’ in Bohemia, but I am a widow.”