Carola laughed.
“I have touched you at last,” she answered feverishly. “You do despise me.”
Luc was silenced and convicted; there fell a silence neither could break. The brilliant sun was hidden by a cloud, and a greyness entered the gorgeous but dreary little room.
“Good-bye,” said Carola at length.
She rose, and so unsteadily that she had to catch hold of the sofa for aid; it slipped back under her hand, and the movement dragged the faded red drapery from the picture behind her. A brilliant oil-painting of a dark-haired woman clad in drapery ruffled by a light wind stepping through an undergrowth of fairy bushes with two hounds in leash, flashed out on Luc.
Something stirred in his memory; he saw that the face was the face of Carola herself, younger, more blooming, and more gay.
“Who painted that picture?” he asked.
She looked swiftly over her shoulder; then went behind the sofa, picked up the drapery, and flung it over the heavy frame.
“I thought it had been moved,” she murmured.
“You were the model?” asked Luc. “And the subject is Bellona?”