"To the regicides," von Herrnung returned harshly, "Austria will do—nothing that very much matters. It is not an important thing to destroy two trapped rats. But I think there will be an ultimatum from Vienna to the Servian Government; and if the terms of that are not complied with, then the Emperor of Austria may give the signal for his monitors upon the Donau to open fire upon the capital of Belgrade."
Patrine asked negligently, as a new surge of the crowd thrust her tall, lithe figure away from her companion's, forcing her to tighten her hold upon his arm:
"'Monitors?' ... I used to think monitors were big schoolboys and schoolgirls. Senior pupils told off to keep order. I was one myself once.... Chosen because I was bigger, and noisier, and naughtier than any other girl in my class...."
"Ha, ha, ha! ... Prächtig! ... That is capital!" She could feel the laughter shaking his big ribs. "That is just what they are—those monitors of the Donau. Each is a big girl who keeps order von anderen Sorte. But they have turned-up noses, not Egyptian and beautiful like yours!"
He added, with the calculated roughness that had previously pleased her:
"You shall now put on your mantel. For the car, I see, is open." He shrugged his broad square shoulders closer into his overcoat and pulled up the collar about his throat, saying ill-temperedly: "Always does one find it with the English. It is lächerlich—that passion for the air."
"Lovely, did you say? ..."
Ignorant or careless that he had said "ridiculous," Patrine suffered him to wrap her mock ermines about her, seeing above the frieze of waiting figures that filled in the lower part of the picture framed by the portico, the emerald-green bird-of-Paradise plume of Lady Beauvayse whisk into the big white Rolls-Royce, past the neat black-haired head of Courtley, and the peaked cap and pale Cockney profile of Morris, the chauffeur. She threw back a jest as she passed out:
"I'm glad you think it lovely. It's one of the nicest things about us—that we're keen on soap and water and can't do without lots of fresh air."
She was in the car before his outstretched hand could touch her. He followed, letting Courtley precede him because he wished to sit opposite, and the great Rolls-Royce purred out of the jam beneath the illuminated glass archway, and in a moment was out of the Place Vendôme and moving with the stream of vehicles down the Avenue of the Champs Elysées. In the mingling of moonlight and electric light the tawdry paste jewels of Patrine's preposterous diadem rivalled the costly splendours of the jewelled fillets adorning Lady Beauvayse's coiffure, her panache of white osprey flared above her broad, dark brows as insolently as though they crowned a Nitocris or a Cleopatra. But—and here was a titillating discovery—the strange face with its broad brows, wide, generously-curving cheeks, and little rounded chin, did not belong to a woman of thirty, or even twenty-five. She was much younger than the German, who plumed himself upon his flair for the accurate dating of women, had at first credited. It would be amusing—he told himself again—hellishly amusing, to cultivate this curious hybrid, half hoyden, half femme-du-monde.