André drew a deep breath, he looked all round the room with a shiver. What did it— A rustle of a woman’s dress. The great curtains were quickly drawn aside. The Princess, as he had seen her first in London with the blood-red flowers on her breast, was watching him, pale and beautiful.
“Why should the clock not be there?” she asked, as if she were continuing a conversation. “Are you so ignorant of Paris, Vicomte, as not to know that the salon in which you stand once belonged to the owners of the clock? It is a fine motto and truer than most. ‘Amour fait tout,’ for example.” She had smilingly selected the motto of the De Néracs. “You don’t agree?”
“I did not come here,” André answered, “to discuss mottoes.”
The appearance of this woman had awakened all his latent anger, his sense of defeat. She should not escape him again.
“No, but to do my business,” she retorted. “I see you have won your despatch and your letter”—they were lying on the table—“and I gladly infer that you have given a scoundrel his deserts. For that I thank you from the bottom of my heart. One libertine and traitor less in the world is a blessing even to women such as I am.”
Her perfect calm, the complete absence of fear, the extraordinary strangeness of their meeting, the crest and motto on the clock, had reduced André to impotent silence. The Princess and crystal-gazer quietly sat down. “One question before you go,” she said in a changed tone—“did Onslow tell the truth when he said that the Chevalier de St. Amant was dead?”
“Yes.”
She stretched her arms,—the gesture was curiously familiar to André,—but she said nothing for some minutes. “It is fate,” was her comment in a tearless voice when she spoke at last. “Fate!” she rose, “fate, dear God!” She was staring with knitted fingers into the cold shadows cast by the four flickering candles. And André was more moved by the sight of her stern, impassive self-restraint than if she had wept. Surely she had loved the dead man, for he was in the company of a sorrow too sacred to be fathomed even by herself.
“Why did you come back,” he asked bitterly, “why did you come back?”
She awoke from her reverie. “Where could I go?” she answered. “To ‘The Cock with the Spurs of Gold’?” She shivered. “To ‘The Gallows and the Three Crows,’ where your police are now? To the Barriers that are guarded by your men? I had not the password. The man who would have given it to me, had I chose to ask it, I have sent to his account. No, my friend, I prefer to be arrested by a gentleman who will do his duty like a gentleman, and will not chaffer with me as if I were a street-walker.”