Langham could have smiled at her petulance, if he had not for once been determined and in earnest.
'You will let me tell it, I hope?' he said quietly. 'I will tell it so that it shall not offend your ears. As it happens, I myself thought it incredible at the time. But, by an odd coincidence, it has just this afternoon been repeated to me by a man who was an eyewitness of part of it.'
Rose was silent. Her attitude was hauteur itself, but she made no further active opposition.
'Three months ago,' he began, speaking with some difficulty, but still with a suppressed force of feeling which amazed his hearer, 'Madame Desforêts was acting in St. Petersburg. She had with her a large company, and amongst them her own young sister, Elise Romey, a girl of eighteen. This girl had been always kept away from Madame Desforêts by her parents, who had never been sufficiently consoled by their eldest daughter's artistic success for the infamy of her life.'
Rose started indignantly. Langham gave her no time to speak.
'Elise Romey, however, had developed a passion for the stage. Her parents were respectable—and you know young girls in France are brought up strictly. She knew next to nothing of her sister's escapades. But she knew that she was held to be the greatest actress in Europe—the photographs in the shops told her that she was beautiful. She conceived a romantic passion for the woman whom she had last seen when she was a child of five, and actuated partly by this hungry affection, partly by her own longing wish to become an actress, she escaped from home and joined Madame Desforêts in the South of France. Madame Desforêts seems at first to have been pleased to have her. The girl's adoration pleased her vanity. Her presence with her gave her new opportunities of posing. I believe,' and Langham gave a little dry laugh, 'they were photographed together at Marseilles with their arms round each other's necks, and the photograph had an immense success. However, on the way to St. Petersburg, difficulties arose. Elise was pretty, in a blonde childish way, and she caught the attention of the jeune premier of the company, a man'—the speaker became somewhat embarrassed—'whom Madame Desforêts seems to have regarded as her particular property. There were scenes at different towns on the journey. Elise became frightened—wanted to go home. But the elder sister, having begun tormenting her, seems to have determined to keep her hold on her, as a cat keeps and tortures a mouse—mainly for the sake of annoying the man of whom she was jealous. They arrived at St. Petersburg in the depth of winter. The girl was worn out with travelling, unhappy, and ill. One night in Madame Desforêts's apartment there was a supper party, and after it a horrible quarrel. No one exactly knows what happened. But towards twelve o'clock that night Madame Desforêts turned her young sister in evening dress, a light shawl round her, out into the snowy streets of St. Petersburg, barred the door behind her, and revolver in hand dared the wretched man who had caused the fracas to follow her.'
Rose sat immovable. She had grown pale, but the firelight was not revealing.
Langham turned away from her towards the blaze, holding out his hands to it mechanically.
'The poor child,' he said, after a pause, in a lower voice, 'wandered about for some hours. It was a frightful night—the great capital was quite strange to her. She was insulted—fled this way and that—grew benumbed with cold and terror, and was found unconscious in the early morning under the archway of a house some two miles from her sister's lodgings.'
There was a dead silence. Then Rose drew a long quivering breath.