Part 17 (1/2)

”You are not altered, in fact,” said Rosas. ”I am mistaken--”

”Yes, I know. I have grown lovelier. That is a compliment that I am used to--Lissac has told me that already, only the other morning.”

She bit her lips almost imperceptibly, as if to blame herself for her imprudence, but had she mentioned Guy's name designedly, she could not have been better satisfied with the result. Monsieur de Rosas, usually very pale, became pallid, and a slight curl of his lip, although immediately suppressed, gave an upward turn to his reddish moustache.

”Ah!” he said, ”You still see Guy.”

”I!--I had not spoken a single word to him until I asked him to have an invitation sent me for this soiree, and then it was merely because I knew you would be here.”

”Ah!” said Jose again, without adding a word.

Marianne was satisfied. She knew now that the duke still loved her, since the mention of Lissac's name had made him tremble. Well! she had shrewdly understood her Rosas.

”And what have you been doing, my dear duke, for such an age?” she said.

She looked at him as she had looked at Vaudrey, with her sweet and shrewd smile, which moved him profoundly, and her glance penetrated to the inmost depths of his being.

”You know the old saying: 'I have lived.' It is great folly, perhaps, but it is the truth.”

”And I wager,” boldly said Marianne, ”that you have never thought of me.”

”Of you?”

”Of me. Of that mad Marianne, who is the maddest creature of all those you have met in your travels from the North Pole to Cambodia, but who has by no means a wicked heart, although a sufficiently unhappy one, and that has never ceased to beat a little too rapidly at certain reminiscences which you do not recall, perhaps--who knows?”

”I remember everything,” replied the duke in a grave voice.

Marianne looked at him and commenced to laugh.

”Oh! how you say that, _mon Dieu!_ Do you remember I used to call you Don Carlos? Well, you have just reminded me of Philip II. 'I remember everything!' B-r-r! what a funereal tone. Our reminiscences are not, however, very dramatic.”

”That depends on the good or ill effects that they cause,” said Rosas very seriously.

”Ah! G.o.d forgive me if I have ever willingly done you the least harm, my dear Rosas. Give me your hand. I have always loved you dearly, my friend.”

She drew him gently toward her, half bending her face under the cold glance of the young man:

”Look at me closely and see if I lie.”

The duke actually endeavored to read the gray-blue eyes of Marianne; but so strange a flash darted from them, that he recoiled, withdrawing his hands from the pressure of those fingers.

”Come, come!” she said, ”I see that my cat-like eyes still make you afraid. Are they, then, very dreadful?”

She changed their expression to one of sweetness, humility, timidity and winsomeness.

”After all, that is something to be proud of, my dear duke. It is very flattering to make a man tremble who has killed tigers as our sportsmen kill partridges.”

”You know very well why I am still sufficiently a child to tremble before you, Marianne,” murmured Jose. ”At my age, it is folly; but I am as superst.i.tious as gamblers--or sailors, those other gamblers, who stake their lives, and I have never met you without feeling that I was about to suffer.”

”To suffer from what?”