He did not notice a gleam like that of such which flashed over him one instant from the unrevealing eyes of his wife; the next moment the eyes of the bust were not colder and more impenetrable than hers.
'I have long meant to tell you,' he continued with rapidity, his words now coming with eagerness and eloquence from his lips. 'But I have been afraid of your ridicule. Long ago, in the midsummer of last year, I found the child of Bonaventure dying in the streets. It was at the time my uncle was on his death-bed. I did all I could for her, of course. She was long ill; when she recovered I placed her in the country with good simple people whom I knew. She is there now. Rosselin, the great actor whose name you will remember, though his career was over before your time or mine, has trained her these many months past; he believes she has great talents; that she has a future; that when you predicted the career of Desclée for her you showed your usual insight. She has had little but sorrow since that day you tempted her from her island; it has always seemed to me that we owed her a great debt, that we had done her a great brutality; but for us her life would have gone on in peace and prosperity, she would never have left her little kingdom; if you realised what you did that day you would regret your caprice. There are many more details I could tell you if you cared to hear them, but I know your intolerance of any demand upon your patience.'
She smiled slightly; the smile was very chill; it checked the expansion and the confidence of his words.
'You are pleased to ridicule my knight-errantry, no doubt,' he said, with heightened colour in his face. 'But no man living would have done less than I did, I think, being conscious as I was that the invitation which you gave her without thought was the origin of all her unmerited misfortune. I believe you were right that she has genius or something very nearly approaching genius, in her; and it may be that the world will in time compensate to her for all she has lost. But meantime——'
'You do so!'
The words were very calm and cold, but they struck Othmar like the cut of a whip. They cast on his words the dishonour of disbelief.
He strove to command his temper as he replied: 'I do not; no one can; she lost what no one ever can give back to her, when you showed her what the world was like, and taught her discontent. But for you, and that one evening in your house, she would have lived, and married, and spent all the even tenour of her days in her native air, on her native soil, as ignorant of ambition as any of the sea-birds on her coast.'
She looked at him with an expression of fatigue, and of exhausted patience; he saw that she was perfectly incredulous, that his words might as well have remained unspoken for any impression of their truthfulness which they conveyed to her.
'Is this all your story?' she asked.