"Pray what has this woman to do here?" he asked.
"Woman indeed!" rounded Melot, breathing again. "Woman! do you call me names, Messire? Keep them for the baggage you fetched in!"
Prosper saw the whole thing in a flash. He grew still more polite.
"Seneschal," he said, "have the goodness to inform your mistress of my coming. Pray that I may wait upon her immediately…. I think," he added after a pause, "I think that you had better go at once."
The seneschal agreed that he had. He went.
Prosper waited in silence, in a crowd equally silent.
The seneschal shortly returned.
"Her ladyship will see Messire at once. I beg Messire to follow me."
He entered the Countess's chamber, and, lifting his head, looked at a white lady on a throne. He had never seen her so before. She was dressed in pure white, with a face near as dead as her clothes. All that was dark about it haunted her masked eyes. She sat with her chin in her hand, looking and waiting for him; when he came, and the seneschal was dismissed with a curt nod, she still sat in the same dead fashion, watchful of her guest, unwinking, pondering. Prosper, for his part, bided the time. He guessed what was coming, but a word from him might have put him in the wrong.
In the end the Countess broke the long silence. He thought he had never heard her voice; it sounded like that of a tired old woman.