I heard them as I would have heard any other words, for she had that kind of voice which carries a long distance.  But the maid’s statement occupied all my mind.  “Madame n’est pas heureuse.”  It had a dreadful precision . . .  “Not happy . . .”  This unhappiness had almost a concrete form—­something resembling a horrid bat.  I was tired, excited, and generally overwrought.  My head felt empty.  What were the appearances of unhappiness?  I was still naive enough to associate them with tears, lamentations, extraordinary attitudes of the body and some sort of facial distortion, all very dreadful to behold.  I didn’t know what I should see; but in what I did see there was nothing startling, at any rate from that nursery point of view which apparently I had not yet outgrown.

With immense relief the apprehensive child within me beheld Captain Blunt warming his back at the more distant of the two fireplaces; and as to Dona Rita there was nothing extraordinary in her attitude either, except perhaps that her hair was all loose about her shoulders.  I hadn’t the slightest doubt they had been riding together that morning, but she, with her impatience of all costume (and yet she could dress herself admirably and wore her dresses triumphantly), had divested herself of her riding habit and sat cross-legged enfolded in that ample blue robe like a young savage chieftain in a blanket.  It covered her very feet.  And before the normal fixity of her enigmatical eyes the smoke of the cigarette ascended ceremonially, straight up, in a slender spiral.

“How are you,” was the greeting of Captain Blunt with the usual smile which would have been more amiable if his teeth hadn’t been, just then, clenched quite so tight.  How he managed to force his voice through that shining barrier I could never understand.  Dona Rita tapped the couch engagingly by her side but I sat down instead in the armchair nearly opposite her, which, I imagine, must have been just vacated by Blunt.  She inquired with that particular gleam of the eyes in which there was something immemorial and gay: 

“Well?”

“Perfect success.”

“I could hug you.”

At any time her lips moved very little but in this instance the intense whisper of these words seemed to form itself right in my very heart; not as a conveyed sound but as an imparted emotion vibrating there with an awful intimacy of delight.  And yet it left my heart heavy.

“Oh, yes, for joy,” I said bitterly but very low; “for your Royalist, Legitimist, joy.”  Then with that trick of very precise politeness which I must have caught from Mr. Blunt I added: 

“I don’t want to be embraced—­for the King.”

And I might have stopped there.  But I didn’t.  With a perversity which should be forgiven to those who suffer night and day and are as if drunk with an exalted unhappiness, I went on:  “For the sake of an old cast-off glove; for I suppose a disdained love is not much more than a soiled, flabby thing that finds itself on a private rubbish heap because it has missed the fire.”