She folded away her treasure in the envelope that bore the Empress's handwriting, and hid it away again in its sweet nest close to her innocent heart. Life and vivacity were hers again as she descanted upon the graces and gifts of her Imperial princeling, and P. C. Breagh listened, grateful for the change in her. The shadow came back for a moment as she told him:
"And when I descended to the vestibule, Madame had gone away.... She had been seized with faintness in the moment of our arrival, when she had encountered a stranger passing through the hall.... Then I went back to the hotel, and crept up to my room quietly. Madame—whom I had discovered to be my mother!—was engaged with a visitor.... I do not know at all who he was. But I heard him say, on the other side of the door that was between us ... 'When she comes, you shall present me to the little Queen of Diamonds!' And he laughed.... Mon Dieu! how strange a laugh!... It made me feel cold. It makes me cold even now to remember it.... But I do not think I have been really warm since the night upon which I found the portrait, and my mother said: 'The discovery was inevitable! Now, with your leave, I am going to sleep!'"
With such truth did she render the very tone of the sumptuous Adelaide's languid irony that P. C. Breagh started as though he had been stung. Somewhere he had met someone ... a woman who spoke like that?... Who was she? Where had they encountered?... He beat his brains to evoke some reply, in vain. And Juliette went on:
"It does me good to tell you this, Monsieur, though I thought at first I would not. You will understand how terrible it was to discover in this lady, who had deceived me, the mother whom I have believed dead until a few months ago. There was something in her very beauty, and ah! she is so beautiful!—that made me regard her with terror.... See you, I prayed to Our Blessed Lady for aid to overcome that terror. Then at the daybreak, I rose and went to her bed. When I saw her sleeping, I think I feared her more than ever. The face can reveal so much, Monsieur, in sleep. And hers was a sleep uneasy, and troubled by visions.... Without waking she said a thing so strange.... 'Only a woman of fashion would be guilty of such infamy!' ... What made you start so violently, Monsieur?"
For P. C. Breagh had jumped as though he had been hit by a bullet. His mouth screwed itself into the shape of a whistle, his eyes rounded unbecomingly. He remembered when and where he had heard that utterance—in the resonant accents of the Man of Iron, and addressed to the adventurous beauty encountered at the Foreign Office in the Wilhelm Strasse, Berlin.
What were the words that had preceded the sentence, scathing in their irony, terrible in their implied contempt?
"It would have required fewer scruples and more toughness than Agamemnon possessed to have offered up an only daughter to Venus Libertina.... Only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy.... Pardon! but you have dropped your parasol!"
And an English boy had picked it up, and seen the devastating change wrought in that softly tinted mask of sensuous beauty, by Conscience, roused to anguish by the vitriol splash of scorn.
So the Duessa of the Wilhelm Strasse was Madame de Bayard! How strange the chance encounter that had brought them together in that house! What was the bargain she had hoped to drive with Bismarck? What had she intended when she had taken her daughter to Rethel? Who was the man who had been waiting to be presented to the little Queen of Diamonds?... And how true had been the instinct that had warned the girl of danger, whose nature her Convent-bred innocence made it impossible for her to conceive?
She was speaking: