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Madame de Vallorbes smiled to herself, recalling certain episodes, and shook her charming shoulders gleefully, as she looked out into the sunny morning. And then, was there not ample excuse? This man moved her more than most more than any. She swore he did. Her attitude towards him was something new, something quite different, thereby justifying her campaign.
Richard shifted his position a little, gathering himself back from her so near neighbourhood a fact of which the young lady was not unaware. "I'm not quite sure whether I echo your prayer," he said slowly. "I doubt whether that attitude, or one approximate to it, is not the safest and best for some of us." "Safest, no doubt." Madame de Vallorbes' eyes were bent on the crystal sphere again.
Yet, notwithstanding her pious exercises, Helen de Vallorbes found existing circumstances excessively disturbing and disquieting. She was filled with an immense self-pity. She feared her health was failing. She became nervously sensible of her eight-and-twenty years, telling herself that her youth and the glory of it had departed. She wore black dresses, rolled bandages, pulled lint.
I shall take Chifney with me for a few days. But the stables will not give you any trouble. He will have given all the orders." "Very well," Katherine said mechanically. "Later I shall go on to Baden-Baden." Katharine rallied somewhat. "Helen de Vallorbes is there," she said, not without a trace of her former pride. "Certainly Helen de Vallorbes is there," he answered. "That is why I go.
Not only were privations, dismal hauntings of siege and slaughter, left behind, and M. Destournelle, just now most wearisome of lovers, left behind also, but de Vallorbes himself had, for the time being, become a permissibly negligible quantity. The news of more fighting, more bloodshed, had just reached her, though the German armies were marching back to the now wholly German Rhine.
And, beholding this, instinctively he raised her hand from where it rested upon his thigh, and put it from him, put it upon her glistering, crocus-yellow lap where her soul had so lately kneeled. "Let us say no more, Helen," he entreated, "lest we both forfeit our remaining chance, and become involved in hopeless and final condemnation." But Madame de Vallorbes' anger rose to overwhelming height.
"Tell Garçia to be here in good time to drive me to the San Carlo. I have an appointment at the opera to-night." The opera box, which Richard Calmady had rented along with the Villa Vallorbes, was fifth from the stage on the third tier, to the right of the vast horseshoe. Thus situated, it commanded a very comprehensive view of the interior of the house.
Lied, too, with a notable cheerfulness, born as cheerfulness needs must be of every act of faith and high generosity. "I remember it? Of course not," he said. "So let the legend be abolished henceforth and forevermore. Here, once and for all, Cousin Helen, we combine to pull down and bury that scarecrow." Madame de Vallorbes clapped her hands softly and laughed.
All this was framed by the arch of the door. Madame de Vallorbes glanced at it, while she pulled down the soft waves of hair, which her late exertions had slightly disarranged, over her right temple. Then she turned impulsively to Lady Calmady. "Thank you, dear Aunt Katherine," she said. "I would so like you to like me, you know."
"As it is safer to decline a duel, than go out and meet your man. Best? On that point you must permit me to hold my own opinion. The word best has many readings according to the connection in which it is employed. Personally I should always fight." "Whatever the odds?" "Whatever the odds." And almost immediately Madame de Vallorbes uttered a little cry, curiously at variance with her bold words.
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