“I?” said Maggie, with a little laugh.  “Oh—­I think about my dresses, and the new fashions, and parties, and all the things that girls do think of.”

Catrina shook her head.  She looked stubborn and unconvinced.  Then suddenly she changed the conversation.

“Do you like M. de Chauxville?” she asked.

“No.”

“Does Paul like him?”

“I don’t know.”

Catrina looked up for a moment only.  Then her eyes returned to the contemplation of the burning pine-logs.

“I wonder why you will not talk of Paul,” she said, in a voice requiring no answer.

Maggie moved rather uneasily.  She had her back turned toward Catrina.

“I am afraid I am rather a dull person,” she answered.  “I have not much to say about any body.”

“And nothing about Paul?” suggested Catrina.

“Nothing.  We were talking of M. de Chauxville.”

“Yes; I do not understand M. de Chauxville.  He seems to me to be the incarnation of insincerity.  He poses—­even to himself.  He is always watching for the effect.  I wonder what the effect of himself upon himself may be.”

Maggie laughed.

“That is rather complicated,” she said.  “It requires working out.  I think he is deeply impressed with his own astuteness.  If he were simpler he would be cleverer.”

Catrina was afraid of Claude de Chauxville, and, because this was so, she stared in wonder at the English girl, who dismissed him from the conversation and her thoughts with a few careless words of contempt.  Such minds as that of Miss Delafield were quite outside the field of De Chauxville’s influence, while that Frenchman had considerable power over highly strung and imaginative natures.

Catrina Lanovitch had begun by tolerating him—­had proceeded to make the serious blunder of permitting him to be impertinently familiar, and was now exaggerating in her own mind the hold that he had over her.  She did not actually dislike him.  So few people had taken the trouble or found the expediency of endeavoring to sympathize with her or understand her nature, that she was unconsciously drawn toward this man whom she now feared.

In exaggerating the power he exercised over herself she somewhat naturally exaggerated also his importance in the world and in the lives of those around him.  She had imagined him all-powerful; and the first person to whom she mentioned his name dismissed the subject indifferently.  Her own entire sincerity had enabled her to detect the insincerity of her ally.  She had purposely made mention of the weak spot which she had discovered, in order that her observation might be corroborated.  And this Maggie had failed to do.