“Who is Sister Saint Bernard?”
“She is a nun of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul. You know, the nursing-community. I stayed some time with them at their Convent at Paris, studying their good, wise, enlightened methods, visiting their hospitals with them, helping to tend their sick. We were returning with a patient that night I saw Madame de Roux. It was a case of brain-fever, a young girl, an attendant at one of the gaudy, disreputable restaurants of the Palais-Royal, delirious and desperately ill. No conveyance could be got to take her to the Charité; the Sisters’ van was otherwise engaged. We hired a vegetable-truck from a street fruit-seller, on the understanding that it should be whitewashed before being returned to him, wrapped the poor girl in blankets, and wheeled her to the Hospital ourselves.”
“By—George!” said Bertham softly and distinctly. His forehead was thunderous, and his lips were compressed. She went on as though she had not heard:
“And so, as we went through the Rue de Richelieu, and Sister Saint Bernard and I, and the truck, were passing the Théâtre Français, into which all fashionable Paris was crowding to see the great actress play ‘Phédre,’ a beautiful woman alighted from a carriage and went in, leaning on the arm of a stout short man in uniform, with some decorations.... I pointed his companion out to Sister Saint Bernard. ‘Tiens,’ she said, ‘voilà Madame la Comtesse de Roux. Une grande dame de par le monde.’ And that is how I came to know M. de Moulny’s enchantress by sight.... I wonder whether M. Dunoisse has met her?”
“It is more than probable, seeing that the lady is his Colonel’s wife. And,” said Bertham, “if he has not yet had the honor of being presented, he will enjoy it very soon. A Hereditary Prince of Widinitz is a personage, even out of Bavaria. And whether the son of the Princess Marie Bathilde and old Nap’s aide-de-camp likes his title, or whether he does not, it is his birthright, like the tail of the dog. He can’t get away from that!”
“He does look,” said Ada Merling, with a smile, “a little like what a schoolgirl’s ideal of a Prince would be.”
“Àpropos of that, a Prince who is not in the least like a schoolgirl’s ideal of the character dines with us at Wraye House on Tuesday. The Stratclyffes are coming, and the French Ambassador, with Madame de Berny.”
He added, naming the all-powerful Secretary for Foreign Affairs, with a lightness and indifference that were overdone:
“And Lord Walmerston.”
“Lord Walmerston!...”