The Prince said:
"Pray give orders that the sick lady is to have every attention!"
D'Aure answered that the wife of the Prefect was with Madame even then. He saluted, and repeated with an accent of finality:
"For the space of ten minutes, Monseigneur...."
Then he bowed to Mademoiselle de Bayard, and went quickly out of the room.
The Prince began, with a touch of boyish pompousness:
"We have met before, Mademoiselle. My thanks for the violets!"
For he knew this face with cheeks so fairly rose-tinted, with eyes that shone brilliant as blue jewels from their covert of black lashes, with the softly-smiling mouth. The dull moth shone out a butterfly in the radiance of the joy that overbrimmed her. She was near her Prince Imperial, Juliette de Bayard, who was not so much loyal as Loyalty incarnate, to whom the tawdry figure of the Emperor was invested with godlike splendor, in whose esteem the Empire was France—her France....
She was attired as she had been when she left Brussels with Adelaide. Only a fichu of black and white Malines lace that she had brought in the handbag containing linen and toilet requisites, had been pinned about her narrow, sloping shoulders, and a tiny bonnet matching this was perched upon her magnificent coils of cloudy-black hair. Her deft fingers had fashioned it in a few minutes out of the long ends of the over-ample fichu. A bunch of fragrant red roses had been pinned upon her bosom by Madame. She had purchased out of her own slender resources a fringed gray silk parasol and a pair of little gray kid gloves. And in this hastily arranged toilette she looked elegant, refined, exclusive as any slender aristocrat of the Faubourg St. Germain. You would never have suspected the tumult beneath her sedate composure. Yet she thrilled in every fiber as she swept her stateliest curtsey before the slender boy in the unassuming uniform of a subaltern of infantry.
"Monseigneur is too good to remember so infinitely trifling an occurrence ... more than gracious to consent to receive me now! But that my dear father is a prisoner in the hands of the Prussians, I would not dare to intrude upon the privacy of my Prince. Oh, Monseigneur! of your pity prevail upon the Emperor to obtain the exchange of my father for some German officer of equal rank in his Army! Think, oh, pray!—think how I..."