“A hundred thousand pardons! My Colonel, how idiotic of me not to have remembered that I had the honor of meeting Madame de Roux upon the Public Promenade at Bagneres only yesterday.... I ventured to accost Madame, and asked her whether I could have the honor to convey any message to you? Madame said ‘None,’ but added that she felt deliciously well. And to judge by appearances, there is no doubt but that the air of Bagneres agrees with her to a marvel!”
De Kerouatte reeled off this unblushing fabrication with an air of innocence ineffably insulting, inconceivably fraught with offense. De Roux could grow no blacker—against the congested duskiness of his face his little red wild-boar’s eyes showed pale pink. They routed savagely in the large blue orbs of the speaker, guileless and unruffled as pools upon a Mediterranean shore, found nothing there; were wrenched away.... He gobbled out the beginning of an incoherent sentence—and then a messenger came with a hurried summons from the Minister, and the Colonel clanked and jingled back into the Hotel, from the gates of which pedestrians were unobtrusively gliding, while coupés, chariots, barouches, and landaus, driven by nervous coachmen and with pale faces peeping from their windows, or hidden behind their close-drawn blinds, or concealed behind thick veils, or upturned collars of cloaks and overcoats, were rolling hurriedly away.
The Colonel’s gilt spurs had not long jingled over the tesselated pavement of the vestibule, before, from one of the smaller, private waiting-rooms, the figure of a lady emerged. A tall, rounded shape moving with a swaying supple grace “as though on clouds,” wrapped in an evening mantle of sumptuous ermines, its snowy folds drawn close as though its wearer were desirous of silencing even the whisper of silken skirts; a thick veil of creamy lace wrapped about her head. She beckoned with a little hand, that had great blazing rubies on its slender finger and childlike wrist; and from a corner of the wide courtyard, crashing over the broken glass and shattered fragments of the carved stone wreaths that garlanded the high windows, came a little, dark brougham lined with gray velvet, a vehicle of the unpretending kind in which ladies who gambled on the Bourse were wont to drive to their stockbrokers, or in which ladies who gambled with their reputations were accustomed to be conveyed elsewhere....
A nondescript official, neither lackey nor porter, still mottled and streaky in complexion from the recent alarm of the fusillade, emerged from some unlighted corner of the tall portico into the flaring yellow gaslight, followed the lady of the ermine mantle down the wide steps, and with zealous clumsiness suggestive of the Police, pushed forward to open the carriage door. Recoiling from his assiduous civility with palpable uneasiness, the lady shook her veiled head. The intruder persisted, prevailed; and in that instant found himself thrust aside by the vigorous arm and powerful shoulder of a tall, heavily-built young man in the chocolate, gold-buttoned, semi-military undress frock that distinguished secretaries and attachés of the Ministry.
“You presume, my friend!” said a voice the lady knew; and she rustled to her seat, and settled there with nestling, birdlike movements, a light brown, carefully-curled head bent towards her. The scent of cigars and the fashionable red jasmine came to her with the entreaty:
“There may be peril for you in these streets.... Will you not let me accompany you home?”
“In that coat.... Not for the world!” said a soft voice through the intervening veil, and the warm perfumed darkness of the little brougham. “You would expose me to the very peril you are anxious to avert.”
“True!” he said, repentant. “I was a fool not to remember! Grant but a moment and the coat is changed!”
“I would grant more than a moment,” she answered in a voice of strange, ineffable cadences, “to the wearer, were the coat of the right color!” A little trill of laughter, ending the sentence, robbed it of weight while adding subtlety. But its meaning went to the quick. De Moulny sighed out into the fragrant darkness:
“Oh,—Henriette! Henriette!”