"Merci millefois, Madame! ..."
Patrine turned from the hireling's thanks to see the high head and powerful square shoulders of von Herrnung forging towards her, towering above the polyglot, variegated crowd. He hailed her with:
"So you met a friend? Is that why I found myself deserted?"
She answered coldly:
"I did not desert you—and I did not meet a friend."
His face, still suffused with a purplish flush, pouched and baggy about the eyes, told of the maelstrom of unhealthy excitement the dance of the jaguars in the jungle had set whirling in his brain. She guessed that he had taken advantage of their separation to descend into the ball-room, and that as one of the spectators in the front rank he had revelled in the final thrill. He persisted:
"Was? But what means it? I have lost you.... I think you must have gone down into the ball-room after your friend.... I follow and you are not there. I come back to find you.... Who was that dirty bounder I saw you talking to?"
"He wasn't a dirty bounder!" His rudeness enraged her. "He was a nice, clean, first-class, top-hole, plucky English boy!"
He sneered:
"'Boy' ... Men of forty are boys, in the mouths of you English ladies. You borrow the term from women of the street-walking class."