“Of course—of course! It’s quite possible—in fact it’s certain!” cried Germaine.
“It’s horrible!” gasped Sonia. “Consider—just consider! Suppose something happened to him. Suppose the Duke—”
“It’s me the Duke’s fighting about!” cried Germaine proudly, with a little skipping jump of triumphant joy.
Sonia stared through her without seeing her. Her face was a dead white—fear had chilled the lustre from her skin; her breath panted through her parted lips; and her dilated eyes seemed to look on some dreadful picture.
Germaine pirouetted about the hall at the very height of triumph. To have a Duke fighting a duel about her was far beyond the wildest dreams of snobbishness. She chuckled again and again, and once she clapped her hands and laughed aloud.
“He’s fighting a swordsman of the first class—an invincible swordsman—you said so yourself,” Sonia muttered in a tone of anguish. “And there’s nothing to be done—nothing.”
She pressed her hands to her eyes as if to shut out a hideous vision.
Germaine did not hear her; she was staring at herself in a mirror, and bridling to her own image.
Sonia tottered to the window and stared down at the road along which must come the tidings of weal or irremediable woe. She kept passing her hand over her eyes as if to clear their vision.
Suddenly she started, and bent forward, rigid, all her being concentrated in the effort to see.