“I believe she is the devil,” he said to himself when he saw her alight from the railway carriage, affecting a pretty air of invalidism as she came towards him.
She had been ill in Marseilles, she said, and her physician had ordered her to Switzerland for a change of air, “and here you are, at the Schweitzerhof, I suppose. All the swells go there. I was once there a month with dear Felix, but now,—” she hesitated a moment and then went on: “I did not write you the nature of the business which took me so suddenly to Passy and Marseilles. I knew your good heart would be so sorry for me. Felix was not as rich as I supposed. He has a brother to whom he owed a great deal of money and who had a mortgage on the chateau. He is there now, and I,—I am poor. I must go to the Cygne, where it is cheaper.”
She said all this very rapidly, with a tear or two on her eyelashes, which might have dropped on her nose, if she had ever done so unbecoming and vulgar a thing as to let a tear stand upon that organ. She had the rare faculty to cry just when she wanted to, and also to keep her tears where they would do the most effective work. Naturally she did not go to the Cygne, but to the Schweitzerhof, and took a parlor and bedroom and seemed anything but poor. She was, however, very quiet, and mixed but little with any of the guests, except Carl. Over him she speedily resumed her influence to some extent. She was so bright and original and said such amusing things, and always made him feel at his best with her delicate flattery, which seemed so sincere that he could not resist her.
“Katy stands on so high a plane of puritanism that I can’t touch her with a ten-foot pole. I always feel like a cad with her, while with Julie I am satisfied and believe myself a pretty good fellow,” he thought, and drifted again into an atmosphere he knew was unhealthy and one which he would not like Katy to breathe.
Of himself he would not have told Julie that Katy had been there; but Madame heard of her from Paul, who was full of Katy, so beautiful, he said, and Carl loved her so much and sat with her under the chestnuts and rowed on the lake, and everything. Others than Paul talked of the lovely American who had sung for them one night in the parlor as no one had ever sung in Lucerne before. Every guest in the house had come in to hear her, while a crowd had gathered outside to listen. Madame smiled sweetly as she heard all this, but there was fierce jealousy in her heart of this young girl who had come between her and Carl. He might never marry her, she knew, but she would bind him to her with one of those Platonic friendships which French women delight in, and which would remove Katy from her path almost as effectually as marriage would have done.
“American women are so prudish,” she thought, “and cannot understand that a man and woman can be everything to each other and still be perfectly correct. Once let Katy believe there is something between us not quite au fait, and I have nothing to fear from her.”
Still Katy troubled her, and she felt an irresistible desire to talk of her to Carl, but always on the assumption that she was his sister and nothing more.
“They tell me your sister is very beautiful and sings divinely. I wish I might have seen her. You must be proud of her,” she said to him, and he answered, “She is beautiful, and I am proud of her.”
Madame understood at once that he would rather not discuss Katy with her, and her eyes shone for a moment with a dangerous light, as she said next, “You must love her very much?”
To this Carl made no answer, and Madame continued: “She was very young, I believe, when your mother went to The Elms, was she not?”