One need hardly say that there was play on these occasions, besides excellently prepared dishes and a liberal flow of the champagne, besides the cognac and liqueurs of which Madame drank a good deal.
To quiet her nerves, raveled by the unhappy situation of her beloved country, she declared, for it suited her to be a Frenchwoman now.
She would have dearly liked to inveigle a Duke, Grand or Hereditary, or even a Prince Regnant, to her roof-tree and her baccarat-board, but these personages, bestarred and beribboned, furred, jack-booted, buck-skinned and long-spurred, were as shy as the hares and partridges in the forest, that were incessantly cracked at by hungry pot-hunters. Wherefore the sumptuous Adelaide must perforce be contented with Counts and Barons, whose purses were less lengthy than their pedigrees, as a rule.
"A solitary nest and too remote, it may be.... But for a bride and bridegroom, solitude and remoteness have their advantages!" had proclaimed M. de Straz, with a shrug of infinite meaning, and suggestive glances of his black Oriental eyes. Certainly the guests of Madame and Monsieur, even when conveyed to the destination in hired broughams and victorias, were wont to find the road, running through abandoned villages and by deserted châteaux, unexpectedly barricaded with felled timber and scarred with unfinished trenches, more than a trifle long.
The nest of these love-birds, half a mile from the sacked railway station and the broken bridge of Maisons Lafitte, was enclosed in private grounds. The villa Laon—how or from whom acquired, nobody ever thought of questioning—was a cottage with Swiss gables and East Indian verandas standing in gardens adorned with glass arcades and Italian pergolas, their vines and roses stripped and shuddering in the bitter wintry winds. There were also Chinese bridges crossing pieces of ornamental water, aviaries of finches and canaries, and wired enclosures once well stocked with silver pheasants, now, thanks to the nocturnal ravages of mysterious marauders, depopulated in a manner painful to behold.
"You pretend," said Valverden teasingly to Adelaide, "that the neighbors creep out at night and annex the pheasants, or that our cavalry pickets take them for the mess-pot, or that they are stolen by Francs-tireurs. Francs-tireurs there are in plenty in the neighborhood—every hour some honest German soldier gets his death at the hands of one of these scoundrels!—but as far as concerns the vanished inmates of the pens and cages, I believe you and M. de Straz have eaten them yourselves."
He stretched his long spurred legs out over the brocade of an Empire sofa gracing Madame's boudoir, and leaning back his handsome head, looked up at her teasingly.
"With my assistance, for that salmis we had for breakfast was of home production I am certain. Come, own that I have guessed as well as Mariette can cook at a pinch."
Adelaide frowned and bit her lip. But she let her gaze dwell lingeringly on the upturned face of the handsome Guardsman, and said, seeming to search for her own sulky, splendid image in the blue eyes with which Adonis made play:
"If you were less like Max I believe I should detest you!..." She added, after an instant: "And if you resembled him more than you do, you would find no welcome here."