"Why did you leave?"
"I was put into a passion one day, and madame said after that she was frightened to keep me. Ah! I have had adventures, I can tell you. In the next place I did not stay three months; the ennui came to me, and I left it for another that I found; and the other one I liked—I had my liberty. I should have stayed in that, but one came and turned me out of it."
"A fresh governess?"
"No; a man. A hideous. He was madame's brother, and he was wrinkled and yellow, and his long skinny fingers were like claws. He wanted me to marry him; he said he was rich. Sell myself to that monster? No!—continue a governess, rather. One evening madame and my two pupils had gone to the Odéon, and he came to the little étude where I sat. He locked the door, and said he would not unlock it till I gave him a promise to be his wife. I stormed, and I stormed: he tried to take my hand, the imbécile! He laughed at me, and said I was caged——"
"Why did you not ring the bell?" interrupted Herbert.
"Bon! Do we have bells in every room in the old Parisian houses? I would have pulled open the window, but he stood against the fastening, laughing still; so I dashed my hand through a pane, and the glass clattered down to the court below, and the servants came out to look up. 'I cannot undo the étude door,' I called to them; 'come and break it open!' So that hideous undid it then, and the servants got some water and bathed my hand. 'But why need the signora have put her hand through the glass? Why not have opened the window?' said one. 'What is that to you?' I said. 'You will not have to pay for it. Bind my hand up.' They wrapped it in a handkerchief, and I put on my bonnet and cloak, and went out. Madeleine—she was the cook, and a good old soul—saw me. 'But where is the signorina going so late as this?' she asked. 'Where should I be going, but to the pharmacien's?' I answered; and I went my way."
"We say chemist's in England," observed Herbert. "Did he find your hand much damaged?"
"I did not go there. Think you I made attention to my hand? I went to the—what you call it?—cutler's shops, through the Rue Montmartre, and I bought a two-edged stiletto. It was that long"—pointing from her wrist to the end of her finger—"besides the handle. I showed it to that hideous the next day. 'You come to the room where I sit again,' I said to him, 'and you will see.' He told madame his sister, and she said I must leave."
Herbert Dare looked at her—at her pale face, which had gone white in the telling, her glistening, stony eyes, her drawn lips. "You would not have dared to use the stiletto, though!" he cried, in some wonder.
"I not dare! You do not know me. When I am roused, there's not a thing I would not dare to do. I am not ruffled at trifles: things that excite others do not trouble me. 'Bah! What matter trifles?' I say. My mother always told me to let the evil spirit lie torpid within me, or I should not die in my bed."