"Are you going to sleep all day?" she demanded. "You wouldn't if you knew what had happened. The little one's gone. I can't find her in the house or the grounds, and her bed ain't been slept in all night."
She gazed suspiciously into madame's startled face, which was not so handsome now with the cosmetics washed from it, and that frown wrinkling her brow. She repeated Mima's word in apparently stupid amaze:
"Gone!"
"Yes, gone! Don't you know anything about it? Ain't you had a hand in it?"
Mme. Lorraine, sitting up in bed in her night-robe of soft white linen, burst out, indignantly:
"Look here, Mima, don't make a fool of yourself. If the girl's gone, it's none of my work. She threatened, the last time I beat her, that she would run away, and I suppose she's kept her word. I've noticed that some of the men that come here were sweet on her, and she's gone with one of them, no doubt."
Mima stood like one petrified, looking at her, when she suddenly burst out again:
"Oh, dear! perhaps she has taken Selim! Run, Mima, to the stables. Oh, the little wretch!—if she dared—"
Mima interrupted, harshly:
"She has not taken your idol. I knew she was in the habit of stealing him out for a wild canter sometimes, and I ran to the stables when I missed her. Selim was there all right, and the ponies, too."