XXVIII

“What do you say to Nice to-morrow, dearest?” the Princess suggested a few evenings later as she followed Undine upstairs after a languid evening at bridge with the Duchess and Madame de Trezac.

Half-way down the passage she stopped to open a door and, putting her finger to her lip, signed to Undine to enter.  In the taper-lit dimness stood two small white beds, each surmounted by a crucifix and a palm branch, and each containing a small brown sleeping child with a mop of hair and a curiously finished little face.  As the Princess stood gazing on their innocent slumbers she seemed for a moment like a third little girl scarcely bigger and browner than the others; and the smile with which she watched them was as clear as theirs.  “Ah, si seulement je pouvais choisir leurs amants!” she sighed as she turned away.

“—­Nice to-morrow,” she repeated, as she and Undine walked on to their rooms with linked arms.  “We may as well make hay while the Trezac shines.  She bores Mamma frightfully, but Mamma won’t admit it because they belong to the same oeuvres.  Shall it be the eleven train, dear?  We can lunch at the Royal and look in the shops—­we may meet somebody amusing.  Anyhow, it’s better than staying here!”

Undine was sure the trip to Nice would be delightful.  Their previous expeditions had shown her the Princess’s faculty for organizing such adventures.  At Monte-Carlo, a few days before, they had run across two or three amusing but unassorted people, and the Princess, having fused them in a jolly lunch, had followed it up by a bout at baccarat, and, finally hunting down an eminent composer who had just arrived to rehearse a new production, had insisted on his asking the party to tea, and treating them to fragments of his opera.

A few days earlier, Undine’s hope of renewing such pleasures would have been clouded by the dread of leaving Madame de Trezac alone with the Duchess.  But she had no longer any fear of Madame de Trezac.  She had discovered that her old rival of Potash Springs was in actual dread of her disfavour, and nervously anxious to conciliate her, and the discovery gave her such a sense of the heights she had scaled, and the security of her footing, that all her troubled past began to seem like the result of some providential “design,” and vague impulses of piety stirred in her as she and the Princess whirled toward Nice through the blue and gold glitter of the morning.

They wandered about the lively streets, they gazed into the beguiling shops, the Princess tried on hats and Undine bought them, and they lunched at the Royal on all sorts of succulent dishes prepared under the head-waiter’s special supervision.  But as they were savouring their “double” coffee and liqueurs, and Undine was wondering what her companion would devise for the afternoon, the Princess clapped her hands together and cried out:  “Dearest, I’d forgotten!  I must desert you.”