CHAPTER XLVI.
'Send the children to me,' she said when at last she rang for her women, and the children came. They had come in from their morning's ride on their small ponies in the Bois. They were very pretty in their velvet riding dresses, with their golden hair flowing over their shoulders; they were very gentle and had admirable manners; the little boy with his cap in his hand kissed his mother's fingers with an old-world grace. She drew them both towards her.
'Mes mignons,' she said, looking alternately at each of them, 'I want you to tell me something quite honestly; are you afraid of me, either of you?'
The young Otho, a very sensitive and chivalrous child, coloured to his hair and was silent; his sister Xenia, less timid and more communicative, answered for him and for herself: 'We are both of us—a little.'
The brows of Nadine contracted with a sudden sense of pain.
'Why?' she said imperiously.
The children did not reply; their small faces grew serious; they were not prepared to analyse what they felt.
'Do you mean,' she continued, 'that if you wished for anything you would sooner ask your father for it than you would ask me?'
The children nodded their heads silently. They had lost their colour. She saw that the interrogation alarmed them.