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Updated: June 1, 2025
Her outward air of indifference was as irritating to him as it had been to the Hippodrome Manager. Sobrenski's blood had never stirred for any woman, however charming, and Arithelli's type of looks was repulsive to him. He loathed her thinness and pallor, her silence and immobility of expression. He vowed inwardly that she should look less indifferent before he had finished with her.
She would come into Arithelli's dressing room and weep, and smoke innumerable cigarettes, and when things had been going well, they made a partie carrée at the Café Colomb.
He fished the bedraggled bouquet out of the water and hung it like a trophy across Arithelli's mirror, which was a fetish of its owner and the one valuable thing she now possessed. It had been the gift of Michael Furness, who had bought it from the Jewish herbalist.
Vardri strolled across to a rack, and took down an armful of saddles and stirrups. "I have," he answered laconically. "They'll be ready in five minutes." Sobrenski turned to the girl, and spoke to her in an undertone. "What are you wasting time for? See to your work." Vardri raised his head from the adjustment of a girth. "I'm doing Mademoiselle Arithelli's work.
He walked straight to the bed, and glanced at Arithelli's throat, now almost covered with white patches of membrane. There was no time to waste if she was to be saved from the ghastliness of slow suffocation.
He could look at Arithelli's position quite judicially, and as an outsider. The world, religious and otherwise, would certainly not give her the benefit of the doubt. She was young, she was possessed of a weird and haunting beauty, she had no women friends, no relations, and no companions but a set of law-breakers, all of whom were men.
The Señor must not be alarmed, she added, folding Arithelli's blue habit with wrinkled, careful hands. True, Barcelona was an evil place for one so young as "La Nina," but the blessed saints Emile gave her a peseta, and left her to her invocations. In the long passage that led from the dressing-rooms he ran into Estelle, who was just sufficiently drunk to be excitable and quarrelsome.
He turned over the few coins in his hand. Just enough to keep him for a week and then the deluge! He waited, prowling up and down the street, impatiently until Emile appeared in the distance. A few minutes later, the two men were at the door of Arithelli's lodgings.
In passing the house where Michael Furness lodged, he stopped to leave a message as to Arithelli's condition, and the advisability of another visit. When "The Witch" touched at Corfu for letters Count Vladimir found among them one that twisted afresh the thread of two destinies his own and that of a woman.
Excitement and the feverish devil of consumption had turned his blood to fire. He would take no denial, pay no heed to Arithelli's entreaties for time to think, and to consult Emile. For once he forgot to be gentle, and dragged her head back roughly, whispering passionate words, his face pressed against her own.
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