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He loved her, anyway, and always would, were she a thousand times the Countess de Roannes, but it was too late! too late! "Always remember, Paul, wherever you are and whatever you do," went on Opal, "that I love you. I know it now, and I know how much!
They say she is going to marry that old French Count, de Roannes! That's the fellow over there, watching her with the cat's eyes. I guess he thinks she means to have her fling first and I guess she thinks so too! As usual, it's the spectator who sees the best of the game. What a curious girl she is a living paradox!" "How's that?" "Spanish, you know.
"It might be disastrous!" "True, it might," said Opal, and she did not smile. "I echo your kind hope, Count de Roannes." And the Boy looked, and listened, and loved! As they left the dinner-table, Opal passed the Boy on her way to her stateroom, and laying her hand upon his arm, looked up into his face appealingly. He wondered how any man could resist her.
And the Boy glared at de Roannes with unspeakable profanity in his eyes, while the girl laughed to herself and enjoyed it all as girls do enjoy that sort of thing. It was delightful, this game of speaking eyes and lips. "Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away!"
That evening, from the hotel at Lucerne, two telegrams flashed over the wires. One was addressed to the Count de Roannes, Paris, and read as follows: "Shall reach Paris Monday afternoon. Opal." The other was addressed to Sir Paul Verdayne, at Venice, and was not signed at all, saying simply, "A son awaits his father in Lucerne." That night a sudden storm swept across Lucerne.
You have your own womanly instincts every woman's impassable wall of fire, if she will only hide behind them. You could never love unworthily!" "But, Paul, don't you know? Haven't they told you? I shall probably marry the Count de Roannes!" Paul was astounded. "Opal! No! No! Not that, surely not that! I heard it, yes a moment ago. But I could not believe it. The idea was too horrible.
He was greatly disturbed by something. There was no denying that. He had found the voice, but Gilbert Ledoux and daughter, Miss Opal Ledoux, of New Orleans, accompanied by Henri, Count de Roannes, of Paris, have taken passage on the Lusitania, which sails for New York on July 3rd." It was she, of course! who else could it be? Surely there could not be more than one Opal in America!
And Paul wondered. As for the Count de Roannes, the Boy dismissed him at once as unworthy of further consideration. He was brilliantly, even artificially polished glaringly ultra-fashionable, ostentatiously polite and suave. In the lines of his bestial face he bore the records of a lifetime's profligacy and the black tales of habitual self-indulgence.
She should give herself to Paul Zalenska, the man not to Paul the Prince! His rank should gloss over nothing nothing and for all she knew now to the contrary, her future rank as Countess de Roannes was superior to his own.
"Tell me about it," he said sympathetically. And she told him, sparing herself details, as far as possible, of the storm of scandal about to burst upon the family a storm from which only the sacrifice of herself could save the family name of Ledoux, and her mother's memory. It might, or might not, be true, but the Count de Roannes claimed to be able and ready to bring proof.
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