“Yes, very young,” Carl replied, wondering vaguely how Madame knew so much about The Elms as she sometimes seemed to know.
“Paul has told her a great deal, I dare say,” he thought, and then, at a sudden turn of Madame’s head and a lifting of her eyelids there came to him a misty kind of feeling, such as he had several times experienced, that somewhere he had seen just such a poise of the head and heard just such purring tones as belonged to Madame Felix.
He had never spoken to her about it, but now, glad of anything which would turn the conversation away from Katy, he asked abruptly if she were ever in America.
“In America!” she answered with great energy. “Mon dieu! Jamais! America, Monsieur?—nothing could tempt me to cross the sea. I die upon the Channel. Why do you think I have been in America?”
“Because you remind me of some one I must have seen,” he said, “and just now when you were talking of Katy I could almost think who it was.”
“Impossible that you could have seen me. Impossible!” and Madame shook her head very decidedly, but said no more of Katy, either then or afterwards.
Carl was going to Homburg from Lucerne, and when he told Madame of his intention she declared it to be the very place where she was expecting to go, hoping the waters would do her good and where she knew of an inexpensive pension.
“I must retrench now,” she said. “Nearly every letter I get brings worse news than the one before with regard to my fortune, which I thought so large. I really ought not to have staid at this hotel, and but for the accident of meeting you should not.”
Carl understood her, and with his usual generosity offered to pay her bills, and when she declined with horror from putting herself in so questionable a position, especially as she had no Felix to protect her, he felt almost as if he had insulted her and promptly asked her pardon, offering as a loan what her self-respect would not allow her to take as a gift. This she accepted, and a week later found her in Homburg, whither Carl had preceded her by a few days.