She was nervous and pale; her hands played restlessly with the pearls at her throat; her beautiful eyebrows were drawn together in anger and distress. She did not say so, but more than once her shoulders had felt the stroke of Jean Bérarde's heavy cudgel.
'He must know our name very well,' added Othmar. 'It will surely be voucher enough to him that you have passed your time in safe keeping——?'
'You are "aristos." He hates you.'
He smiled; he had seen many of these red Republicans who hated him furiously in theory, yet were never averse to worshipping the golden calf of the Maison d'Othmar.
'Seriously,' he said, 'do you think that you will be punished cruelly if you should be here all night? Are you sure that your grandfather will not be open to reason?'
'You do not know him, or you would not ask.'
'No; I do not know him, and so I have no right to form any opinion. But I see that what you do know of him makes you miserable at the idea of his anger. Well, then, home you must go in some manner. Our promise to you must in some way or other be kept. Wait a moment here, and I will return to you.'
Damaris looked after him with interest and gratitude. Young though she had been when the death of Yseulte had moved the hearts of the whole people on those shores, something of its sadness and of its tragedy had reached her, and still remained in memory with her like the echo of some melancholy song heard at evening in the shade of the olive-woods. They had been mere names to her, but they had been names of pathos and of meaning, like the names of Athalie, of Ondine, of Calypso, and of Helen—names attached to a story, leaving a recollection, suggesting something outside common life and ordinary fate.
'I suppose he has forgotten her long ago,' she thought as she looked at him as he passed through the salons.
Othmar approached his wife, and waited impatiently until there was a pause in the conversation buzzing around her. Then he bent towards her: