She added, with a little mocking peal of laughter:
“Except me. Imagine it!—he actually believes that I am going with him to Algiers—that horrible piratical Moorish seaport, full of negroes and Arabs and monkeys and smells. We shall have a scene when he learns that I remain behind in Paris—he has already been quite tragic over the idea of parting from ’Riette and Loulu and Bébé. He cried—imagine him in tears!—and said that he should never see them again—he was quite certain of it! And he has gone to Bagneres to-day with a cartload of toys and bonbons. Oh yes!—he is absurdly fond of the children. It is not because he did not wish them to live with us that you have not seen them at home.”
Dunoisse knew a sudden sickness at the heart. She had given this very explanation unasked. So, then, those lovely lips could lie.... The warm, soft arm about his neck suddenly seemed heavy as an iron collar, the fragrant breath upon his eyes scorched. He freed himself from Henriette with a sudden movement; rose up, dropping the newspaper; and went to the open window and stepped out upon the balcony, seeking a purer air.
Thence he said, without looking round:
“He loves ’Riette and Loulou and Bébé, I suppose, as a man usually loves his children. Is there anything absurd in that? Perhaps you know?”
She leaped at him and caught him by the arm, and said, from behind him, in a voice jarred and shaken with strange passion:
“What—what do you mean? You shall tell me! Look round! Do not hide your face!”
He had meant nothing. His utterance had been prompted by a sudden stab of compunction, a feeling of pity for the man whom he had betrayed and supplanted, and was now about to exile. But when he turned and met the sharp suspicion in the eyes of Henriette, he knew what she believed he had meant. And with that new and strange expression in them, those lovely eyes seemed to look at him through the holes of an exquisite mask, hiding another face, that, once revealed, would chill the soul with dread, and stamp its Medusa-image on the memory—never to be forgotten, however long one lived.
His own face looked strangely at him from the frames of mirrors that gave back its hardened outlines and less brilliant coloring. Treachery had always been loathsome in Dunoisse’s eyes. Yet of what else had he been guilty but the blackest treachery in his dealings with the husband of Henriette?
Deny it! What? Had he not taken his hand in friendship and betrayed him? Procured his removal by bribery, parted him from the woman whose truth he believed in, and from the children whom he loved?