"When one's flat on the ground one hasn't to stoop, you know," answered the visitor, calmly arranging the folds of her veil drawn over a cheap plumed hat, under which a chalk-white countenance with gleaming eyes revealed itself menacingly. "I chanced to see in the local paper that Clan had arrived to stop with you, and so simply timed my visit when you would feel most impelled to pay to get rid of me. What, for instance, if he were to step in at this moment, through that window into the garden? Wouldn't it be rather cheap at the price to see the last of me for a couple of hundred francs or so?"
Lady Campstown, with a swelling heart, walked over to her escritoire, unlocking a compartment thereof to take out two bank-notes of the amount indicated. She despised herself for the action, but could not trust her voice to speak.
"Thanks, so very much," said Ruby, superbly putting her gains into a bag of gilded meshes hanging at her waist. "And as I see you flashing the lightning of your virtuous eye upon that poor, shuddering numbskull of a Rosa there, let me at least exonerate her from any complicity in the arrangement for my visit here to-day."
"I have heard that you have been seen lately in the lane below my garden," exclaimed the dowager hotly, "and that some one in my household is under suspicion of having been holding conversation with you in the bamboo walk. I can only say that if this happens again Rosa goes out of my service on the minute."
Ruby, who had been covetously looking around the luxurious, familiar room, shrugged her shoulders indifferently.
"I suppose I must not detain you," she said conventionally, turning to withdraw. "But since you have suggested it, I would be really quite glad to have Rosa escort me back to my hotel. The effort of coming here—perhaps the force of old associations—has proved something of an ordeal to me. My heart is rather spinning around, and I am not altogether sure I can answer for the strength necessary to support my legs on the retreat."
"Go, Rosa, put on your hat and jacket as I bid you, and accompany Madame," said Lady Campstown, nervously anxious to end the scene at any cost. A fuller view of Mrs. Darien's face had showed her the awful extent to which time and an evil life had ravaged it. She would not look at her a second time, but, shuddering, walked away to the window and set it wide open, standing with her back to the offender, in speechless disgust and misery.
To be one minute unobserved was enough for Ruby Darien. She had been standing near a little cabinet, on a shelf of which was accustomed to lie Lady Campstown's own especial pass-key through the little green door into the garden of Reine des Fées. Since the occupation of the place by tenants this had not been used. But things were not wont to change their position often at Villa Julia, and the key still lay in its old corner undisturbed. Ruby's nimble fingers closed upon and transferred it to the interior of her little gilded bag, while Lady Campstown, resolved not to speak to her visitor again, kept her position at the window.
"I suppose, then, I may go?" said Ruby, laughing softly. "In view of your inhospitable attitude, I have really no excuse for lingering. Au revoir, Aunt Lucy. I will return to you your old Rosa unspotted by the world. And if it will add to Clan's pleasure to hear I am near him, give him my compliments."
CHAPTER XI