He turned to Mills suddenly.

“Will your cousin come south this year, to that beautiful villa of his at Cannes?”

Mills hardly deigned to answer that he didn’t know anything about his cousin’s movements.

“A grand seigneur combined with a great connoisseur,” opined the other heavily.  His mouth had gone slack and he looked a perfect and grotesque imbecile under his wig-like crop of white hair.  Positively I thought he would begin to slobber.  But he attacked Blunt next.

“Are you on your way down, too?  A little flutter. . .  It seems to me you haven’t been seen in your usual Paris haunts of late.  Where have you been all this time?”

“Don’t you know where I have been?” said Mr. Blunt with great precision.

“No, I only ferret out things that may be of some use to me,” was the unexpected reply, uttered with an air of perfect vacancy and swallowed by Mr. Blunt in blank silence.

At last he made ready to rise from the table.  “Think over what I have said, my dear Rita.”

“It’s all over and done with,” was Dona Rita’s answer, in a louder tone than I had ever heard her use before.  It thrilled me while she continued:  “I mean, this thinking.”  She was back from the remoteness of her meditation, very much so indeed.  She rose and moved away from the table, inviting by a sign the other to follow her; which he did at once, yet slowly and as it were warily.

It was a conference in the recess of a window.  We three remained seated round the table from which the dark maid was removing the cups and the plates with brusque movements.  I gazed frankly at Dona Rita’s profile, irregular, animated, and fascinating in an undefinable way, at her well-shaped head with the hair twisted high up and apparently held in its place by a gold arrow with a jewelled shaft.  We couldn’t hear what she said, but the movement of her lips and the play of her features were full of charm, full of interest, expressing both audacity and gentleness.  She spoke with fire without raising her voice.  The man listened round-shouldered, but seeming much too stupid to understand.  I could see now and then that he was speaking, but he was inaudible.  At one moment Dona Rita turned her head to the room and called out to the maid, “Give me my hand-bag off the sofa.”

At this the other was heard plainly, “No, no,” and then a little lower, “You have no tact, Rita. . . .”  Then came her argument in a low, penetrating voice which I caught, “Why not?  Between such old friends.”  However, she waved away the hand-bag, he calmed down, and their voices sank again.  Presently I saw him raise her hand to his lips, while with her back to the room she continued to contemplate out of the window the bare and untidy garden.  At last he went out of the room, throwing to the table an airy “Bonjour, bonjour,” which was not acknowledged by any of us three.

CHAPTER III