Daylight was waning, and although the Venetians were drawn half-way up the windows, the room was in twilight. To De Miravel it seemed almost in darkness as he went in; but in a few moments his eyes became more accustomed to the semi-obscurity, and he then perceived his wife standing in the middle of the floor—a tall, black-robed figure, crowned by a face whose extreme pallor, seen by that half-light, would have seemed like that of a dead woman, but for the two large, intensely glowing eyes which lighted it up.
After his first momentary hesitation, De Miravel advanced a few steps and made one of his elaborate bows. Madame De Vigne responded by a grave inclination of her head, and motioning her visitor to a chair, sat down herself on an ottoman some distance away. In the silence, not yet broken by either of them, they heard the low, far-away muttering of thunder among the hills.
De Miravel was the first to speak. ‘I am desolated, madame, to have been under the necessity of seeking this interview,’ he said. ‘But I have been waiting, waiting, waiting till I have grown tired. I am tired of being here alone in this great hotel, where I know no one. It is now two days since I spoke to you. You know my proposition. Eh bien! I choose to wait no longer; I am here for your answer.’ He spoke the last words with a kind of snarl, which for the moment brought his long, white, wolfish-looking teeth prominently into view.
‘As you say, I am fully acquainted with your proposition,’ answered Mora in cold, quiet, unfaltering tones. ‘But you know well how hateful to me are the conditions which you wish to impose. I think I made that point clear to you on Wednesday.’
‘You were in a passion on Wednesday. I heeded not what you said.’
‘But I meant every word that I said. In view of that fact, and knowing what you know—may I ask whether in the interim you have not seen some way by which those conditions may be modified—some way by which, without injury to what you conceive to be your interests, they may be made less objectionable to me?’
He shook his head impatiently. ‘You are only wasting my time and yours,’ he said. ‘When I have said a thing, I mean it. As the conditions were on Wednesday, even so they are now—altered in nothing. If you cannot comply with them, tell me so at once, and at once I will seek out Sir William. Ah ha! Mademoiselle Clarice had better wait awhile before she orders the robe for her wedding!’
She heard him apparently unmoved. There was not a flash, not as much as a flicker to be seen of the passion which had so possessed her on Wednesday. Her quietude surprised him, and rendered him vaguely uneasy.
‘Consider, Laroche—before it is too late.’
‘Too late?’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Peste! What can she mean?’