So, stooping over the couch, she said:
"Do you know who arrived this evening? The Alfred Boysons. I saw them in the hall just now."
"They're on their honeymoon?" asked the faint voice, after a just perceptible pause.
Daphne assented. "She seems a pretty little thing."
Madeleine Verrier opened her tired eyes to look at Daphne. Mrs. Floyd—as Daphne now called herself—was dressed in deep black. The costly gown revealed a figure which had recently become substantial, and the face on which the electric light shone had nothing left in it of the girl, though Daphne Floyd was not yet thirty. The initial beauty of complexion was gone; so was the fleeting prettiness of youth. The eyes were as splendid as ever, but combined with the increased paleness of the cheeks, the greater prominence and determination of the mouth, and a certain austerity in the dressing of the hair, which was now firmly drawn back from the temples round which it used to curl, and worn high, à la Marquise, they expressed a personality—a formidable personality—in which self-will was no longer graceful, and power no longer magnetic. Madeleine Verrier gazed at her friend in silence. She was very grateful to Daphne, often very dependent on her. But there were moments when she shrank from her, when she would gladly never have seen her again. Daphne was still erect, self-confident, militant; whereas Madeleine knew herself vanquished—vanquished both in body and soul.
Certain inner miseries and discomforts had been set vibrating by the name of Captain Boyson.
"You won't want to see him or come across him?" she said abruptly.
"Who? Alfred Boyson? I am not afraid of him in the least. He may say what he pleases—or think what he pleases. It doesn't matter to me."
"When did you see him last?"
Daphne hesitated a moment. "When he came to ask me for certain things which had belonged to Beatty."