“Yes.” She looked bewildered.
Luc saw again, very clearly, the old-fashioned chamber in Versailles and the young suicide lying there; he saw this picture perhaps even more vividly than the dark-eyed woman watching him from behind the striped settee.
“What is the matter?” asked Carola heavily.
Luc collected himself and took a step away from her while he looked at her with sudden flashing keenness.
She was bare indeed now, bare of the last glamour of any illusion—“from the gutters of St. Antoine,” the dead man had said. Her brocades, her jewels, her paint now seemed to hang on her as so many rags that made no pretence to hide the stark crude thing they fluttered round. Luc could not believe that a little while before she had dazzled his vision—she was no longer even mysterious. He had nothing more to say to her; a weary disgust sealed his spirit; his face flushed with changes of thought, but he ended on silence.
“Ah, you are moved now, I think,” said Carola, in her old precise tones—“by what, I wonder?”
Luc put his hand on the door knob; he had nothing to say to her.
“Will you not even speak to me?” she asked; she was gazing at him with great intentness.
He opened the door and went out, closing it after him.
In the corridor he found M. de Richelieu seated on one of the linen-covered chairs, whistling a little air under his breath and beating time to it by delicate movements of his bare right hand. Seeing the Marquis, he rose.