“Are not von Steyregg and Köhler——?” Dunoisse began. She answered before he had completed the sentence:
“They have taken what conveyance they could procure, and posted on to Paris; and had I been wiser I would have accompanied them.... ‘Had I been wiser’ do I say?...” She laughed angrily, plucking at the ribbon of velvet that confined her swelling throat. “One grain of sense would have saved me from the fatal error of accompanying you to that den among the mountains—that hot-bed of bigotry and intolerance—whence we have been—like a pair of lepers!—cast out.” Her teeth chattered, she struck her mouth with her little clenched fist as relentlessly as though it had been an enemy’s. “But you insisted,” she resumed—“I yielded to your persuasions.... Oh!—how hideously I have been repaid!”
His haggard eyes regarded her with a dreadful recollection in them. In her disarray and abandonment—the dishevelled hair, with its drooping curls and loosened coils, the pallor of fatigue that warred with the burnt flush of feverish excitement; the hinted lines and indicated hollows in the passionate, mutinous, changeful face that the merciless daylight revealed as it showed the crumpled silks and soiled laces of the dinner-dress that had been so fresh and dainty a few hours before—she was the Henriette of that morning of his return to Paris—save for the branding mark upon her throat. While in her disillusioned eyes he seemed almost plain, not at all heroic—desperately uninteresting—a poor creature stripped of all his princely garniture.... And she cried, in a voice unlike her own:
“For you have made me blush for you! Why could you not have gone out upon the balcony and spoken to the people? Where were your courage—your manliness—your strength?”
Dunoisse might have answered her: “With you!” but he bowed his head in silence under the lashing hailstorm of her reproaches. The springs of energy were dried up in him; he felt like an old man. She pursued, while her beautiful eyes shot baleful lightnings, and her little teeth gritted savagely:
“How can a woman of spirit love a man who is not manly? You will have yourself to thank for whatever happens now!... Where have you been all this night? What have you done? Into what new kennel of degradation will you next drag me? Or having gone so far, will you abandon your undeniable right, and seek no longer to obtain recognition of your Claim of Succession from the Council of the Federation? That you intend to do so I am quite prepared to hear!”
She paced the painted floor of the meagerly-furnished, bare inn guest-chamber, dragging the woolen rugs awry with her trailing silken flounces, spurning the spotted fawn skins with the toes of her little satin shoes. Dunoisse murmured, as he sank down wearily into the uncomfortable arms of a three-cornered elbow-chair of green-painted pine, upholstered in Berlin-wool cross-stitch, and turned his eyes from her:
“Dearest, my mother has put her veto on the affair—it is for her to decide—and I am bound to respect her wishes.” He added, in a breaking voice: “Would to Heaven they had been known to me before!”
“Your mother!—your mother!” she raved. “Is no one to be considered—no one obeyed but she? You fool!—your wife might meekly submit to be thrust aside because of your duty to your mother.... But not your mistress!—not a woman like me!”
She was beside herself—a beautiful fury—her lovely face distorted—her mouth wrung crooked with the bitter flood of invective, insult, upbraiding, that came pouring from it. He rose, and said, in a tone that was hostile and menacing, while the cold light in his black eyes chilled and daunted her: