'Probably it was not the upholstery. You have struck dumb greater persons than she.'
'When I have desired to do so. But with her I do not remember that I desired it. I desired only to be kind to her. I have always wished to discover genius in some obscure creature.'
'They say Rosselin has discovered one,' said Paul of Lemberg. 'Then you will say, it is his trade.'
'Who is it?'
'Ah, that I know not. Some woman or child who is to revive all the last glories of the French stage. Some one kept in perfect obscurity hitherto, as bird-trainers keep their piping bullfinches in the dark all day long.'
He spoke with no second thought, knowing nothing more than that which he said. But Béthune, silently listening, felt again an uneasy sense as of some guilty complicity in what he withheld from the person whom it most nearly concerned.
Yet it was not for him to give up to her what Othmar had concealed from her. Unwillingly and perforce, his honour and his delicacy made him the reluctant keeper of a secret which he disapproved. 'I have always been his enemy, so I must be now his friend,' he thought with that loyalty which was the strength of his character, though a quality so little known to his generation that it seemed to it to be a weakness.
'Am I an imbecile,' she thought as she drove away from the house, 'am I an imbecile, that this girl I had utterly forgotten haunts me all day long like a phrase of the 'Ruth?' Is it just because I looked at her picture? Or is it because that song of Paul's, "O, reine des champs," made me remember her as I saw her going through the hepaticas under the orange leaves on her strange little island? All these men know something of her, I think, and Otho perhaps knows most.'
As she drove through the streets, lying almost at full length in her carriage, wrapped in furs and with a great bouquet of gardenia idly clasped in her hands, her eyes were closed, but her thoughts were awake. A little contemptuous smile was on her lips, but a great slowly-arousing and amazed suspicion was in her heart.
She had bidden him take his liberty, true. So great sovereigns bid their courtiers take theirs; but evil betides the courtier who is rash enough to construe the bidding literally.