Liane was silent. The light of joy and happiness had suddenly died out of her fair countenance. She seemed to possess some vague recollection of a similar pair of dark, flashing eyes. A face—a strange ghost of the past—came for an instant before her eyes; a thought flashed through her mind and held her appalled. She shuddered, pale as death behind her mask of gauze. Next instant, however, she laughed aloud at her fear. No, she assured herself, it could not be. It was only some faint resemblance, rendered the more vivid because it had come before her amid that reckless gaiety.
Then she smiled at Zertho again happily as before, and they ordered fresh wine, and waited until the cannon thundered from the heights above and the streets grew orderly, ere they started to walk home along the Promenade.
They had, however, been too far off the woman to overhear the strange ominous words she uttered when, with an evil glint in her eyes, she turned from them abruptly with a fierce imprecation upon her lips, her cheeks beneath the velvet mask blanched with suppressed anger.
“No, I am not mistaken,” she had muttered in French, with a dry laugh between her set teeth. “When I met you dancing in the Place de la Préfecture I thought I recognised you, Liane Brooker. I followed, and threw at you in order to obtain a good view of your pretty face in which innocence is so well portrayed. Strange that we should meet again purely by accident; strange, too, that you should cover me with dust and fling your scoop into my face as though in defiance. Little do you dream how near I am to you, or of the ghastly nature of the revelation which I shall ere long disclose. Then the smiles which enchant your admirers will turn to tears, your merry laughter to blank despair, and your well-feigned innocence and purity to ignominy and shame.”
Chapter Eleven.
Monte Carlo.
Carnival’s reign was ended. Pierrot, clown and columbine, hand in hand, had watched the flames consume him, and had danced around the dying embers. His palace had been torn down, the decorations in his honour had disappeared, the colours red and rose were no longer exhibited in the shop windows, for Nice had assumed her normal aspect of aristocratic dignity.
One afternoon a week afterwards, Liane reluctantly accompanied her father and Zertho to Monte Carlo.