All the day she had expected the man whom she had banished to return. She was accustomed to spaniels who crawled humbly up after a beating to solicit another beating rather than remain unnoticed. She had dismissed a certain apprehension which had told her that she had gone too far with the reflection that a man who loved her once did so for ever, and that, as he had returned from Asia, so he would return this morning, however great his offence or his humiliation might have been.
‘He is more romantic than most,’ she had thought, ‘but after all, he must be made of the same stuff.’
Napraxine approached her hurriedly, and scarcely giving himself time to formally greet the gentlemen there, cried to her aloud:
‘Ecoutez donc, Madame! You will never guess what has happened.’
‘It is of no use for us to try then,’ said his wife. ‘You are evidently gonflé with some tremendous intelligence. Pray unburden yourself. Perhaps the societies for the protection of animals have had Strasburg pâtés made illegal?’
‘I have seen the Duchesse, I have seen Baron Fritz, I have seen Melville,’ answered her husband impetuously and triumphantly, ‘and they all say the same thing, so that there cannot be a doubt that it is true. Othmar marries that little cousin of Cri-Cri: the one of whom they meant to make a nun. What luck for her! But they say she is very beautiful, and only sixteen.’
The people assembled round her table raised a chorus of exclamation and of comment. Napraxine stood amidst them, delighted; his little social bomb had burst with the brilliancy and the noise that he had anticipated.
Nadine Napraxine turned her head with an involuntary movement of surprise.
‘Othmar!’ she repeated; her large black eyes opened fully with a perplexed expression.