In less than twenty-four hours the scene enacted in the green-room of the theatre had been reported everywhere—first in the clubs, then in all the salons—not last in the pretty boudoir of Lady Florence Ffolliott.
Every night thereafter Hyacinthe saw her hero sitting in his stall: he never missed once, but generally came in well on toward the end of the performance. At the close of a fortnight, as she was making her way to her room after the curtain had come down for the last time, she met him face to face: he had planned it so.
"What would you?" she asked in the odd foreign fashion that clung to her still, and showed itself when she was taken unawares.
"They say I need nothing;" and the blue eyes laugh down into hers. "They say I need nothing now that I have been crowned by a King with laurel-leaves." But even as he speaks the smile fades from his lips: he sees no answering flash on hers.
"That is what you said in the Vatican that night," she says. "Is it true?"
He begins to fear that she is losing her mind, but he speaks gently to her: "Have we met before, then?"
Hyacinthe, standing between two dusty flies while the mirth of the farce rings out from the stage, tells her dream, for the third time, to-night to him. "Is it true that you need nothing?" she asks again, raising anxious eyes to his.
For a moment the man wavers. Last night he would have laughed to scorn the idea of his not being ready with a pretty speech for a beautiful actress: just now he is puzzled for a reply, and he knows full well that some strange new jarring hand is sweeping the strings of his life. "It is true," he sighs, remembering a true heart that loves him. "I have wealth, position—these things first, for they breed the rest," he says with a small sneer—"troops of friends and the promised hand of a woman whom I have asked to marry me."
"I am sorry," she says at last with a child's sad, unconscious inflection, "but all the same, I have found you. Cupid said I should."
He surveys her calculatingly: he is a very keen man of the world, and he has recovered sufficiently from the peculiarity of the situation to speculate upon it with true British acumen. Shall he, or shall he not, put a certain question to[page 228] her, or leave the matter at rest for ever? Being a person well used to gratifying himself, he asks his question: "Supposing that it had not been true, what would you have had to say to me then?" And, strange to say, his face flushes as he finishes—not hers.