‘Oh, poor soul!—­poor soul!’ she said, aloud, pressing her hands on her eyes.

‘What on earth do you mean!’ said Mrs. Welby’s voice beside her—­startled—­stiff—­a little suspicious.

Eugenie looked up and blushed.

‘I beg your pardon!—­I was thinking of Marie Antoinette.’

‘I’m so tired of Marie Antoinette!’ said the invalid, raising a petulant hand, and letting it fall again, inert.  ’All the silly memorials of her they sell here!—­and the sentimental talk about her!  Arthur, of course, now—­with his picture—­thinks of nothing else.’

‘Naturally!’

’I don’t know.  People are bored with Marie Antoinette.  I wish he’d taken another subject.  And as to her beauty—­how could she have been beautiful, with those staring eyes, and that lower lip!  I say so to Arthur—­and he raves—­and quotes Horace Walpole—­and all sorts of people.  But one can see for one’s self.  People are much prettier now than they ever were then!  We should think nothing of their beauties.’

And the delicate lips of this once lovely child, this flower withered before its time, made a cold gesture of contempt.

In Eugenie’s eyes, as they rested upon her companion, there was a flash—­was it of horror?

Was she jealous even of the dead women whom Arthur painted?—­no less than of his living friends?

Eugenie came close to her, took the irresponsive hand in hers, tucked the shawls closer round the wasted limbs, bent over her, chatting and caressing.  Then, as the sun began to drop quickly, Madame de Pastourelles rose, and went to the corner of the chateau, to see if the gentlemen were in sight.  But in less than a minute Mrs. Welby called her back.

‘I must go in now,’ she said, fretfully.  ’This place is really too cold!’

‘She won’t let me go to meet them,’ thought Eugenie, involuntarily; sharply reproaching herself, a moment afterwards, for the mere thought.

But when Elsie had been safely escorted home, Eugenie slipped back through the darkening streets, taking good care that her path should not lead her across her father and Arthur Welby.

She fled towards the western flight of the Hundred Steps, and ran down the vast staircase towards the Orangerie, and the still shining lake beyond, girdled with vaporous woods.  A majesty of space and light enwrapt her, penetrated, as everywhere at Versailles, with memory, with the bitterness and the glory of human things.  In the distance the voices of the children, still playing beside their nurses on the upper terrace, died away.  Close by, a white Artemis on her pedestal bent forward—­eager—­her gleaming bow in air, watching, as it were, the arrow she had just sped toward the windows of Madame de Pompadour; and beside her, a nymph, daughter of gods, turned to the palace with a free, startled movement, shading her eyes that she might gaze the more intently on that tattered tricolour which floats above the palace of ‘Le Roi Soleil.’