“Because your dear France became too dear to live in.”
“Clever double entendre! No doubt you think it witty! Dear, or not, better a garret there—a room in its humblest entresol than this. I’d rather serve in a cigar shop—keep a gargot in the Faubourg Montmartre—than lead such a triste life as we’re now doing. Living in this wretched kennel of a house, that threatens to tumble on our heads!”
“How would you like to live in that over yonder?”
He nods towards Llangorren Court.
“You are merry, Monsieur. But your jests are out of place—in presence of the misery around us.”
“You may some day,” he goes on, without heeding her observation.
“Yes; when the sky falls we may catch larks. You seem to forget that Mademoiselle Wynn is younger than either of us, and by the natural laws of life will outlive both. Must, unless she break her neck in the hunting field, get drowned out of a boat, or meet some other mischance.”
She pronounces the last three words slowly and with marked emphasis, pausing after she has spoken them, and looking fixedly in his face, as if to note their effect.
Taking the meerschaum from his mouth, he returns her look—almost shuddering as his eyes meet hers, and he reads in them a glance such as might have been given by Messalina, or the murderess of Duncan. Hardened as his conscience has become through a long career of sin, it is yet tender in comparison with hers. And he knows it, knowing her history, or enough of it—her nature as well—to make him think her capable of anything, even the crime her speech seems to point to—neither more nor less than—
He dares not think, let alone pronounce, the word. He is not yet up to that; though day by day, as his desperate fortunes press upon him, his thoughts are being familiarised with something akin to it—a dread, dark design, still vague, but needing not much to assume shape, and tempt to execution. And that the tempter is by his side he is more than half conscious. It is not the first time for him to listen to fell speech from those fair lips.