Some remorseful regret occasionally stirred in him when he thought of his daughter’s lonely life, and when he remembered the passionate love which had been ruptured when she and Vanderlin had parted. He was a bad old man with a shrivelled heart and a numbed conscience, but he was human.
Mouse was at that time especially irritated and depressed. There had come to Cannes that week a young beauty, a mere child, but of extreme loveliness and wonderful coloring, very much what Boo would be in a few more years. This young girl, an Austrian just married to a Russian thrice her age, had turned all heads and occupied all tongues at Cannes, and Mouse, for the first time in her life, had the uncomfortable sensation of being eclipsed, of being rather out of it, as she would have said, in her own phraseology.
It was a dull and unpleasant feeling which filled her with resentment, and made her stare into her mirror with an anxiety and uncertainty wholly new to her.
She was in this kind of mood when Prince Khris walked up the steps of her hotel.
She had come in from driving, fretful and disposed to think that life was more trouble than it was worth, when they brought her a card, and said the gentleman who owned it was waiting downstairs.
“Khris Kar! What can he possibly want with me?” she wondered. She was disposed to let him remain downstairs, and she was in no mood for visitors, especially those who could be of no possible use or amusement to her.
Then she reflected that she had not behaved very well to him, that he had at one time been very intimate at Harrenden House, and also that he had been the father-in-law, at all events for a few years, of the master of Les Mouettes.
“Show him up,” she said irritably to her servant. In another minute the old man entered, frailer, thinner, with the gold dye on his hair more visible, but bland and polished as before, and with the same keen, intent gleam in his pale-blue eyes. She welcomed him sweetly, suppressing a yawn, and seemed as if it were the most natural thing in the world to receive a man against whom society had long closed all its doors.
Who could tell what old Khris might know? She was well aware that she had ousted him out of Harrenden House.
“You are not looking well, Prince,” she said with solicitude, offering him her little silver tray of cigarettes.