“Mademoiselle!” broke from Dunoisse, as with a most painfully-embarrassing consciousness upon him that his unsuspected presence should in decency have been made known to her ere now, he moved from the shadow of the doorway.
“Who is it?”
She turned her face to him, and it was pale and agitated, and there were tragic violet circles round the great brilliant blue-gray eyes. They recognized Dunoisse, and she held out her hand in the frank way that he remembered, and he took it in his own.
“Monsieur Dunoisse!... Colonel Dunoisse I should say now, should I not?”
“I thank you,” he said, “for not completely forgetting me; otherwise, I hardly know how I should have recalled myself to you.”
“Why so? You have not changed,” she answered, looking in the dark keen face. And then, as the light of fire and candles showed the fine lines graven about its eyes and mouth, and the sprinkling of gray hairs upon the high, finely modeled temples, she added: “And yet I think you have.”
“Time is only kind to beautiful women!” Dunoisse responded, paying her the implied compliment with the gallantry that had become habitual. But she answered with a contraction of the brows:
“Time would be kind if this December day, that dawned upon the betrayal of the French Republic, and set upon the massacre and slaughter of her citizens, could be wiped from the calendar forever.”
Tears sprang to her eyes and fell, and her bosom heaved under the jewels that sparkled on its whiteness.
“One should never consent to act against one’s own innate convictions, even to gratify the dearest living friends,” she said. “My mother, the kindest and most unselfish of women, has never ceased to regard my chosen work as a kind of voluntary martyrdom; my duties at the Home, absorbing and delightful as they are, as irksome and unpleasant. ‘If Ada would go out into Society sometimes,’ she says constantly, ‘it would be more natural!’ And so, to please the dear one—who has been, and still is, very ill, and whom I have been nursing—I accepted their Excellencies’ invitation, left her sick-bed, put on my fallals and trinkets—and came here with Mr. and Mrs. Bertham to-night—to join, although I did not know it, in celebrating the perpetration of a crime, and hailing as a great and memorable stroke of statecraft a deed of infamy.”