His tone of bargaining was unmistakable. Adelaide flushed a dusky-red, through which the fading streaks of Straz's love-gift showed plainly, and her dark eyes gleamed covetously as she bent over the young man. She whispered with her hot lips almost touching the diagonal white band of forehead above his soldierly sunburn:
"What, Bernhard? Tell me what it would be worth to you...."
His long blue eyes laughed up into hers, lazily. He said, feeling for the silver case in which he carried his fusees:
"Shall we say ... a little information regarding the whereabouts of Mademoiselle Titania.... M. de Straz has piqued my curiosity, you will observe."
"So!..."
She reared above him like a furious Hamadryad, whispering thickly, for rage dried up her tongue:
"So it is of my daughter you and Nicolas have been talking apart together, both here and at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. Are you both mad? For a pale, plain, dull school-girl ... a peaky, undeveloped, mincing doll!"
He raised himself to a sitting posture, and answered her coarsely:
"Women like you cannot realize what is or is not pleasing to men of my standard. The Prince Imperial must have seen a good many pretty women, young as he is, yet he found your daughter charming, I am told.... M. de Straz, who is a judge, admires her excessively.... If my curiosity is tickled, the fault is your own, for it was you and not M. Straz who first engaged my interest in that quarter.... Did I not speak to Count Moltke at your request of Mademoiselle? Well, he did—though at first he scouted the notion—sound Count Bismarck on the subject, when he called to congratulate him on his First Class of the Iron Cross, and be complimented on his own Order Pour Le Mérite."
He folded his arms on his broad chest and dropped the words out lingeringly, relishingly, his blue eyes gloating over the changes in her tortured face: