"How should I know?" asks Edgar.
"But some one must know! some one must find her!" she exclaims, in a very bad humour. "The Lipinskis have gone home, and have placed her in my charge, and I must wait until she is found before we too can go home. Ah, do you want to dance the cotillon with her? Pray find her, and as soon as you have done so we must go home,--instantly! I do not want to stay another moment." And, in a state of evident nervous agitation, Thérèse suddenly turns to her husband, and continues, "I cannot imagine, Edmund, how you could bring me to this ball!"
"That is a little too much!" her husband exclaims, angrily. "Had I the faintest desire to come to this ball? Did I not try for two long weeks to dissuade you from coming? But you had one reply for all my objections: 'Marie de Stèle is going too.' Since you are so determined never, under any circumstances, to blame yourself, blame the Duchess de Stèle, not me."
"Marie de Stèle could not possibly know that a Russian diplomatist would bring that woman to this ball and present her as his wife."
"Neither could I," rejoins her husband.
"A man ought to know such things," Thérèse retorts; "but you never know anything that everybody else does not know, you never have an intuition; although you have been away from your own country for fifteen years, you are the very same simple-minded Austrian that you always were."
"And I am proud of it!" Edmund ejaculates, angrily.
"Be as proud as you please, for all I care," says Thérèse, as, at once angry and exhausted, she sinks into a leathern arm-chair. "But now, for heaven's sake, find Stella Meineck, that we may get away at last."
Edgar has already departed in search of her. He passes through the long suite of rooms, for the most part empty because all the guests are in the dining-rooms at present.
"They neither of them know anything yet," he says to himself, bitterly, and his heart beats wildly as he thinks, "If she can only explain it all!"