‘Have you seen M. de Vannes alone?’ she resumed, with a sharpness in her voice, due rather to her own sense of the girl’s beauty than to her knowledge of her husband’s admiration for it.
‘Now and then,’ said Yseulte without hesitation. ‘He has come into the schoolroom——’
‘For a lesson in A B C, I suppose?—or a cup of Brown’s green tea?’ said the Duchesse contemptuously. ‘Well, he may conter ses fleurettes ailleurs. I should have thought he had had better taste than to begin in his own house: however,’ she continued, interrupting herself, as she remembered that she was suggesting, ‘I do not suppose it is you who are to blame. But another time, ask my permission before you accept anything from anybody. I will not deprive you of the Duc’s gift. He is in a manner your cousin—your guardian—of course he meant very kindly, but another time remember to come to me. You will tell the Duc that I said so.’
‘Good heavens!’ she was thinking, ‘who would have supposed that Alain had a taste for a creature like that, half a saint and half a baby? To be sure, her eyes are superb, and the throat and bosom—what beautiful lines they have; why did they send her here? She shall go back next week. The wickedness of the thing would charm him; the nearer it was to a crime, the more of a clou it would be. To play Faust under the respectable shade of Brown’s teapot and the big dictionaries would be sure to enthral him, out of its very drollery—men are made like that.’
Then a remembrance of S. Pharamond passed over her, and she said aloud, with an unkind sarcasm in her voice:
‘Perhaps you have other friends beside M. de Vannes? Pray tell me if you have. I fully appreciate the effects of the education which the Dames de Ste. Anne have given you.’
Yseulte coloured scarlet, and the Duchesse’s eyes scanned her face as Blanchette’s had done, without mercy.
‘Pray tell me,’ she continued, with a chill dignity, which was in sharp contrast with the sarcasm and railing of her previous manner. ‘You will be so good as to remember that I stand in the place of your mother; your indiscretions are not alone painful to me, but compromising to me. Is it true that you are intimate with Otho Othmar?’
‘He has been kind to me,’ murmured Yseulte, an agony at her heart and the hot tears standing in her eyes. She did not understand enough of the world to justify herself by the fact that the offender had been presented to her by her cousin herself; nor, if she had done so, would the position she stood in towards Madame de Vannes have allowed her to use such a justification without apparent impertinence. For eight years she had owed everything to the Duchesse.