“It is simply that—perhaps to hasten me to my duties—his Royal Highness this morning sent a ruffian to fight me.”
I have never seen a face so suddenly change as hers did when she heard this; for ordinary she had a look of considerable amiability, a soft, kind eye, a ready smile that had the hint (as I have elsewhere said) of melancholy, a voice that, especially in the Scots, was singularly attractive. A temper was the last thing I would have charged her with, yet now she fairly flamed, “What is this you are telling me, Paul Greig?” she cried, her eyes stormy, her bosom beginning to heave. “Oh, just that M. Albany (as he calls himself) has some grudge against me, for he sent a man—Bonnat—to pick a quarrel with me, and by Bonnat's own confession the duel that was to ensue was to be à outrance. But for the intervention of a friend, half an hour ago, there would have been a vacancy already in the Regiment d'Auvergne.”
“Good heavens!” she cried. “You must be mistaken. What object in the wide world could his Royal Highness have in doing you any harm? You were an instrument in the preservation of his life.”
I bowed extremely low, with a touch of the courts I had not when I landed first in Dunkerque.
“I have had the distinguished honour, Miss Walkinshaw,” I said. “And I should have thought that enough to counterbalance my unfortunate and ignorant engagement with his enemies.”
“But why, in Heaven's name, should he have a shred of resentment against you?”
“It seems,” I said, “that it has something to do with my boldness in using the Rue de la Boucherie for an occasional promenade.”
She put her two hands up to her face for a moment, but I could see the wine-spill in between, and her very neck was in a flame.
“Oh, the shame! the shame!” she cried, and began to walk up and down the room like one demented. “Am I to suffer these insults for ever in spite of all that I may do to prove—to prove——”
She pulled herself up short, put down her hands from a face exceedingly distressed, and looked closely at me. “What must you think of me, Mr. Greig?” she asked suddenly in quite a new key.