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Bertha hesitated a little before accepting her offer of a seat at her side, but once seated she found herself oddly amused. When Madame de Castro chose to rake the embers of her seventy years, many a lively coal discovered itself among the ashes. Seeing the two women together, Edmondstone shuddered in fastidious protest.
He stopped to receive their visitor punctiliously and inquire after his health. "M. Edmondstone cannot have slept well," he remarked. "I did not sleep at all," Edmondstone answered, "and naturally have a headache." Bertha pointed to a wide lounge of the pouf order. "Then go to sleep now," she said; "M. Villefort will read.
Suddenly she rose from her seat ana addressed her husband, who immediately rose also. Then she spoke to M. Edmondstone, and without more ado, the three left the box, the young beauty, a little oddly, rather followed than accompanied by her companions, at the recognition of which circumstance Madame de Castro uttered a series of sharp ejaculations of disapproval. "Bah! Bah!" she cried.
When I have a headache he often reads me to sleep, and I am always better on awaking." Involuntarily Edmondstone half frowned. Absurdly enough, he resented in secret this amiability on the part of M. Villefort toward his own wife.
"Does he," she said, "love me so 'terribly'? Poor M. Villefort?" She did not go to Normandy, however, and still went into society, though not as much as had been her habit. When she spent her evenings at home, some of her own family generally spent them with her, and M. Villefort or Edmondstone read aloud or talked. In fact, Edmondstone came oftener than ever.
Madame Villefort did not seem to talk much. It was M. Ralph Edmondstone who conversed, and that, too, with so much of the charm of animation that it was pleasurable even to be a mere looker-on. One involuntarily strained one's ears to catch a sentence, he was so eagerly absorbed, so full of rapid, gracefully unconscious and unconventional gesture. "I wonder what he is saying?"
"See," she cried; "it was M. Ralph Edmondstone who wrote this, it was to Madame Villefort it was written. It means ruin and dishonor. I offer it to you to read." M. Villefort rose and laid his hand upon his chair to steady himself. "Madame," he answered, "I will not touch it." She struck herself upon her withered breast. "Behold me!" she said. "Me! I am seventy years old! Good God! seventy!
"I always hear him address her as Madame Villefort," reflected Edmondstone, somewhat gloomily. "Oh yes!" answered Jenny, "that is his French way of studying her fancies. He would consider it taking an unpardonable liberty to call her 'Bertha, since she only favors him with 'M. Villefort. I said to him only the other day, 'Arthur, you are the oddest couple!
They were to go into Normandy, and the day before their departure Ralph Edmondstone came to bid them good-bye. Of the three he was by far the most haggard figure, and when Bertha came down to meet him in the empty drawing-room, he became a wretched figure with a broken, hopeless air, For a few seconds Bertha did not speak, but stood a pace or two away looking at him.
"She is too young for such airs! as if she were Madame l'Impératrice herself! Take me to my carriage. I am tired also." Crossing the pavement with M. Renard, they passed the carriage of the Villeforts. Before its open door stood M. Villefort and Edmondstone, and the younger man, with bared head, bent forward speaking to his cousin.
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