To-night she was under the wing of a popular chaperon, in whose veins ran the proudest blood of Spain. The Duchess, acting according to instructions, introduced her to everybody she came across.
Mademoiselle Delmonte, handsome, brilliant, and vivacious, was an immediate success. This aristocratic assemblage, ignorant of her antecedents, only recognising that she was under the wing of the popular Duchess, took her at her real valuation.
Being a woman, she was naturally pleased with her momentary success. But she was sensible enough to know to what she owed it. If these people who were flattering her now had known of her lowly origin, how she had graduated through the circus and the music hall to the possession of wealth, they would have turned their backs on her, as the purse-proud parvenus had done in the democratic salons of the French President.
These bitter reflections rather tended to harden than soften her resolution. To-night she was an avenging angel, bent upon the task of making these insolent people atone for the insults heaped upon the lowly-born.
Once in her triumphant progress she came near to Contraras, who was standing alone, surveying the brilliant scene with his keen, deep-set eyes.
She disengaged herself from the arm of her companion, a handsome young man of some standing in Spanish Society.
“Excuse me a moment. I see an old friend, to whom I must say a few words.”
“What do you think of it all?” she whispered, as she held out her hand.
“What I have always thought of such spectacles as these,” he whispered back. “These besotted creatures feast and dance and make merry, without a thought of their oppressed and toiling fellow-creatures.” He spoke intensely, in the most bitter spirit of his gloomy fanaticism.
She could not linger, “My nerves are in perfect order,” she assured him as she turned away. He smiled kindly at her as she passed on.