They were silent awhile. Then Lynette asked, her soft breath stirring the heavy tresses:
"Why did you do this, dearest? Wasn't it sufficiently beautiful?"
Patrine choked out, blazing crimson to the tips of her little ears:
"No! At least!—It is hideous now and he hated it! I—I had to tell him," a sob and a laugh tangled together, "it was the effect of Paris air!"
Lynette smiled, though the golden eyes were running over: "Bawne thinks so much of you, always!"
"I don't deserve that any one should!"
"Nobody shall speak ill before me of any one I care for! Why did you start?"
For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all the world mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham and Lynette upholding and defending David's daughter, who had brought disgrace upon them. She lifted her head and released herself almost roughly from Lynette's embrace. She stooped down and took the hem of Mrs. Saxham's gown and kissed it, and rose up looking wonderfully big and stately, and extraordinarily tall.
"I love you!" she said in her large warm voice. "You are the best woman I ever met or shall meet, and I am a rotten bad hat! Not worth a penn'orth of monkey-nuts, take my word for it! But—if somebody like you had been my mother—perhaps there'd have been something to show for it to-day."
Lynette might have replied, but just then through the quiet house, unnaturally still without the boyish voice and the boyish laughter, and the clumping of little thick-soled brogues upon the stairs and in the passages, there sounded the sharp whirring ting-a-ting of the hall telephone-bell. She turned and was gone with no more noise than a thrush makes in departure. Left alone, Patrine threw on her bathrobe over the thin nightgown of revealing transparency, lined with the opulent beauty that captures the desires of men, and looked at her fair reflection in the long cheval-glass, smiling with something of the subtlety of the androgynous genius of the Upas Club fountain—the figure that faced the guests as they entered, tying a vizard over its mocking eyes.