“No, Monsieur ... I turn them into friends.” Adding, as he stood confounded at the vast possibilities her words suggested: “And I have wished to know you.... My husband has told me much.... But in these times of disturbance, how is it possible to be social? One can only remain quiescent, and look on while History is made.”
“I have been quiescent enough, Heaven knows!—for nearly a week past,” said Dunoisse, “without even the consolation of looking on.”
Her shadowy glance was full of kindness.
“I know!... Poor boy!” She added quickly: “Do not be offended at my calling you a boy. I am twenty-five—nearly!... Old enough to be your elder sister, Monsieur.... Have you sisters? If so, I should like to call them friends.”
“I had one sister,” said Dunoisse, his eyes upon a night-black curl that lay upon an ivory shoulder. “She died very young—a mere infant.”
“Poor little angel!”
Henriette de Roux rather objected to children—thought them anything but little angels. But her white bosom heaved and fell, and a glittering tear trembled an instant on a sable eyelash. And so infectious is sentiment, that Hector, who dedicated a regret to the memory of the departed cherub on an average once a year, echoed her sigh.
The silver-coated roach, contemplating the dangling bait of the angler, is quite aware that for innumerable generations the members of his family have succumbed to the attraction of the pill of paste that conceals the barbed hook. Yet he deliberately sucks it in, and is borne swiftly upwards, leaving in the round-eyed family circle a gap that is soon refilled.
That tear of Henriette’s was the bait. When her sigh was echoed, it was to the feminine fisher of men significant as the slow, deliberate curtsey of the float is to the angler for the slimy children of the river. Variable as a fay in a rainbow, she smiled dazzlingly upon the young man; and said, touching him lightly upon the arm with her Spanish fan and leaning indolently back in the fauteuil that was almost completely hidden beneath the rippling wavelets of her purplish-gray flounces: