"The tickets," I murmured, "are in my pocket."

Madame bowed.

"Well," she said, "I have seen and heard enough of you to make no further effort to thwart or even to influence you. Yet I have a proposition to make. First of all, consider these things. If we come to no arrangement with each other I shall use every means I can to prevent your obtaining an interview with my father. Everything is in my favour.

He is very old, he has a hatred of strangers, he grants audiences to no one. He never pa.s.ses outside the grounds of the villa, and all the gates are guarded by sentries, who admit no one save those who have the entree. Then, if you attempt to approach him by correspondence, his private secretary, who opens every letter, is one of my own appointing.

I have exaggerated none of these things. It will be difficult for you to approach the King. You may succeed--you seem to have the knack of success--but it will take time. Isobel's re-appearance will be without dignity, and open to many remarks for various reasons. You may even fail to convince my father, and if you failed the first time there would be no second opportunity."

"What you say, Madame," I admitted, "is reasonable. I have never a.s.sumed that as yet my task is completed. I recognize fully the difficulties that are still before me."

"You have common-sense, Mr. Greatson, I am glad to see," she continued.

"I am the more inclined to hope that you will accede to my proposition.

Briefly, it is this! Let me have the credit of bringing Isobel to her grandfather. Her year in London would at all times, in these days of scandal, be a somewhat delicate matter to publish. What you have done, you have done, as I very well know, from no hope of or desire for reward. Efface yourself. It will be for Isobel's good. I myself shall stand sponsor for her to the world. I shall have discovered her in the convent here, and I shall take her back to her rightful place with triumph. All your difficulties then will vanish, your end will have been creditably and adequately attained. For myself the advantage is obvious.

A difference to Adelaide it must make, but it will inevitably be less if the credit of her discovery remains with me. Have I made myself clear, Mr. Greatson?"

"Perfectly," I answered. "But you forget there is Isobel herself to be considered. She is no longer a child. She has opinions and a will of her own."

"She owes too much to you," Madame replied quietly, "to disregard your wishes."

I believed from the first that the woman was in earnest, and her proposal an honest one. And yet I hesitated. The past was a little recent. She showed that she read my thoughts.

"Come," she said, "I will prove to you that I mean what I say. To-night I will give a dinner-party--informal, it is true, but the Prince of Cleves, my cousin the Cardinal, and your own amba.s.sador, shall come. I will introduce Isobel as my niece. The affair will then be established.

Do you consent?"

For one moment I hesitated. I knew very well what my answer meant.

Absolute effacement, the tearing out of my life for ever of what had become the sweetest part of it. In that single moment it seemed to me that I realized with something like complete despair the barrenness of the days to come.

"Madame, if Isobel is to be persuaded," I answered, "I consent."

CHAPTER VIII

"This, then," the Prince remarked, raising his eyegla.s.s, "is the young lady whose romantic history you have been recounting to me? But, my dear lady, she is charming!"

Madame held out her hands affectionately and kissed Isobel, who had entered the room with her cousin, on both cheeks. Then she took her by the hand and presented her to the Prince of Cleves and several others of the company. Isobel was a little pale, but her manner was perfectly easy and self-possessed. She was dressed, somewhat to my surprise, in the deepest mourning, and she even wore a band of black velvet around her neck.

"My dear child," her aunt said pleasantly, "I scarcely think that your toilette is a compliment to us all. White should be your colour for many years to come."

Isobel raised her eyes. Her tone was no louder than ordinary, but somehow her voice seemed to be possessed of unusually penetrating qualities.

"My dear aunt," she said, "you forget I am in mourning for my stepfather, Monsieur Feurgeres, who was very good to me."

A company of perfectly bred people accepted the remark in sympathetic silence. There was not even an eyebrow raised, but I fancy that Isobel's words, calmly spoken and with obvious intent, struck the keynote of her future relations with her aunt.

Isobel, a few minutes later, brought her cousin over to me.

"Adelaide is very anxious to know you, Arnold!" she said quietly. This was all the introduction she offered. Immediately afterwards her aunt called Isobel away to be presented to a new arrival.

"Mr. Greatson," Adelaide said earnestly, "I cannot tell you how delighted I am that all this trouble is over, and that Isobel is coming to us. But I think--I think she is paying too great a price. I think my mother is hatefully, wickedly cruel!"

"My dear young lady," I protested, "I do not think that you must say that. Your mother's conditions are necessary. In fact, whether she made them or not, I think that they would be inevitable."

"You are not even to come to Illghera with us? Not to visit us even?"

I shook my head.

"I belong to the great family of Bohemians," I reminded her, "who have no possessions and but one dress suit. What should I do at Court?"

"What indeed!" she answered, with a little sigh, "for you are a citizen of the greater world!"

"There is no such thing," I answered. "We carry our own world with us.

We make it small or large with our own hands."

"For some," she murmured, "the task then is very difficult. Where one lives in a forcing-house of conventions, and the doors are fast locked, it is very easy to be stifled, but it is hard indeed to breathe."

"Princess," I said gravely, "have you examined the windows?"

"I do not understand you," she answered.

"But it is simple, surely," I declared. "Even if you must remain in the forcing-house, it is for you to open the windows and breathe what air you will. For your thoughts at least are free, and it is of our thoughts that our lives are fashioned."

She sighed.

"Ah, Mr. Greatson," she said, "one does not talk like that at Court."

"You have a great opportunity," I answered. "Character is a flower which blossoms in all manner of places. Sometimes it comes nearest to perfection in the most unlikely spots. Prosperity and sunshine are not the best things in the world for it. Sometimes in the gloomy and desolate places its growth is the st.u.r.diest and its flowers the sweetest."

The service of dinner had been announced. The English Amba.s.sador took Adelaide away from me, but as she accepted his arm she looked me in the eyes with a grave but wonderfully sweet smile.

"I thank you very much, Mr. Greatson," she said. "Our little conversation has been most pleasant."

The Archd.u.c.h.ess swept up to me. She was looking a little annoyed.

"Mr. Greatson," she said, "Isobel is pleading shyness--an absurd excuse.

She insists that you take her in to dinner. I suppose she must have her own way to-night, but it is annoying."

Madame looked at me as though it were my fault that her plans were disarranged, which was a little unfair. And then Isobel, very serene, but with that weary look about the eyes which seemed only to have increased during the evening, came quietly up and took my arm.

"If this is to be our last evening, Arnold, we will at least spend as much of it as possible together," she said gently. "I will be a very dutiful niece, aunt, to-morrow."

We moved off together, but not before I was struck with something singular in Madame's expression. She stood looking at us two as though some wholly new idea had presented itself to her. She did not follow us into the dining-room for some few moments.

The dinner itself, for an informal one, was a very brilliant function.

There were eighteen of us at a large round table, which would easily have accommodated twenty-four. The Cardinal, whose scarlet robes in themselves formed a strange note of colour, sat on the Archd.u.c.h.ess's right, touching scarcely any of the dishes which were continually presented to him, and sipping occasionally from the gla.s.s of water at his side. The other men and women were all distinguished, and their conversation, mostly carried on in French, was apt, and at times brilliant. Isobel and I perhaps, the former particularly, contributed least to the general fund. Isobel met the advances of her right-hand neighbour with the barest of monosyllables. Lady Delahaye, who sat on my left, left me for the most part discreetly alone. Yet we two spoke very little. I could see that Isobel was disposed to be hysterical, and that her outward calm was only attained by means of an unnatural effort. Yet I fancied that my being near soothed her, and every time I spoke to her or she to me, a certain relief came into her face. All the while I was conscious of one strange thing. The Archd.u.c.h.ess, although she had the Cardinal on one side and the Prince of Cleves on the other, was continually watching us. Her interest in their conversation was purely superficial. Her interest in us, on the contrary, was an absorbing one.

I could not understand it at all.