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Then, having half-destroyed his prey, he denied having touched it. I now understood the lines on Henriette's forehead, fine lines, traced as it were with the edge of a razor, which I had noticed the moment I saw her.
Monsieur de Mortsauf found a pair of scissors, and cut through it; I made her breathe salts, and she opened her eyes. The count left the room, more ashamed than sorry. Two hours passed in perfect silence. Henriette's hand lay in mine; she pressed it to mine, but could not speak.
Distrust grew into strong suspicion, and presently consumed him when an old flame of Lady Henriette's, Charlie Forrester, of the Dark Horse, turned up from foreign service, and their names came to be bracketed together by the senseless gossiping busybodies ever ready to tear a pretty woman's reputation to tatters.
Moreover, it was very near the Bois de Boulogne, and if the fashionable world should once begin to pass that way That fashionable society which her mother so affected was Mademoiselle Henriette's fixed idea; and she was amazed that the thought of receiving high-life in his little fifth-floor studio, about as large as a diving-bell, should make their neighbor laugh.
She was pensive, and mild, and a little surprised when Miss Temperley, with a suppressed gasp, urged that the question was deeply serious. It amused Hadria to reproduce, for Henriette's benefit, the theories regarding the treatment and training of children that she had found current among the mothers of the district.
But I had a great deal of very good discourse with him, concerning the difference between the French and the Pope, and the occasion, which he told me very particularly, and to my great content; and of most of the chief affairs of France, which I did enquire: and that the King is a most excellent Prince, doing all business himself; and that it is true he hath a mistress, Mademoiselle La Valiere, one of the Princess Henriette's women, that he courts for his pleasure every other day, but not so as to make him neglect his publique affairs.
Henriette's fixed idea, and she is astonished that the thought of receiving "le high-life" in his little apartment on the fifth floor makes their neighbour laugh. The other week, however, a carriage with livery had called on him. Only just now, too, he had a very "swell" visit. "Oh, quite a great lady!" interrupts Bonne Maman. "We were at the window on the lookout for father.
"The fight was in this very house, was it not?" The landlady, it seemed, was ignorant of Danton's refuge. But Robespierre suspected. He decided to investigate, being a stickler for propriety. Mounting the stairs stealthily, he knocked at Henriette's door. The girl and the man were at their leave-taking. Few words were spoken. The giant clasped both her little hands in his great paws.
Her father and brother were sentenced to death, herself to perpetual confinement in a monastery. But even at this crisis in her life, Henriette's stout heart did not fail her for a moment. "The King may take my life, if he pleases," she said. "Everybody will say that he killed his wife; for I was Queen before the Tuscan woman came on the scene at all."
I always went alone to the Duchesse de Lenoncourt's, where Henriette's name was never mentioned; no one, except the good old duke, who was simplicity itself, ever spoke of her to me; but by the way he welcomed me I guessed that his daughter had privately commended me to his care.
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