“Do not deny it. The sheet of paper upon which the words were traced bore no signature, it is true, but the handwriting could not be mistaken. Or the perfume, that recalled so much when I pressed it to my lips.”
Her beautiful bosom heaved. Her eyes seemed to avoid him.
“My lips, that were more privileged once.... Shall I tell you what words broke from them to-night when they announced you? Ask de Morny, who overheard. He will tell you that I said: ‘Thank Heaven, she is not changed!’”
To be accurate, he had remarked to de Morny that night upon her entrance: “She is still charming!” and de Morny had answered: “And still ambitious, you may depend!”
It suited him that women should be ambitious. All through those years of intrigue and plotting their ambitions were the rungs of the ladder by which he climbed.
She looked at him full, and her beautiful eyes were dewy, and her white bosom rose and fell in sighs that, if not genuine, were excellently rendered. He went on:
“And yet you are changed. You were courageous and high-spirited—you have become heroic. That shot at the Foreign Ministry.... A colossal idea! When I heard of it I applauded the stratagem as masterly. ‘Who of all my friends,’ I wondered, ‘can have been so much a friend?’ Then your little message in Spanish was brought to me in London. I read it and cried out, to the surprise of de Morny and some other men who were sitting with me in the smoking-room of the Carlton Club: ‘Oh, that I had a crown to bestow on her!’ ‘Upon whom?’ they asked, and I answered, before I could check myself, ‘Upon Henriette!’”
She breathed quickly as the instilled poison worked in her. The fiery light of ambition was in her glance. He saw it, and noted that her dress of filmy Alençon lace and the style of her jeweled hair-ornaments were copied, as closely as the prevailing fashion would admit, from a well-known portrait of the Empress Josephine.... It tickled his mordant sense of humor excessively that a lovely woman should endeavor to subjugate him by resembling his aunt deceased. But no vestige of his amusement showed in his sallow face as he went on:
“But magnificent as was the service you rendered, I am glad that you have escaped the pillory of publicity, and the possible vengeance of the Reds. By the way, that young officer who proclaimed before the Military Tribunal, ‘It was I who gave the order to fire! Do with me what you will!’ is here to-night. I told them to send him an invitation. His father was a valued General upon the Staff of my glorious uncle. I desired that he should be presented to me on that account. Pray point him out.”
Then, as the lace-and-tortoiseshell fan wielded by Henriette’s little dimpled hand, loaded with gems which surely were not paste imitations, indicated a young and handsome man in infantry uniform, who from the shelter of a doorway was gazing at her with all his eyes and his heart in them, the drawling nasal voice said: