It was humiliating that he had not searched for her.

“What! no allusion to my stay—­no hint of my possible return?”

“His silence has been perfect as the grave.  Next morning after you left and did not return, master looked at the cover which I had from habit placed for you, and remarked:  ’Oh, by the way, you will have another to lay to-morrow, as we shall have two guests for, I hope, a long time.’  He meant the Danielses, madame.  Their coming made it a little livelier for him and M. Antonino.”

“It looks like a plot,” murmured Cesarine, indignantly, as she pictured the happy reunions out of which she had been displaced in memory—­not even her untouched plate left as memento! her chair taken by Rebecca Daniels!

“Mr. Daniels is like M. Antonino, too!” continued Hedwig.  “Not only is he getting up the company for the master’s inventions, but for the young gentleman’s—­he has made such a marvel of a rifle—­they put a tin box into it, and lo! you can fire three hundred shots as quick as a wink!  I walk in terror since I heard of it! and I touch things as if they would go off and make mince-meat of me in the desert to it.”

“Never mind that!” cried Madame Clemenceau, testily.

“Although the connection between piping at music halls and enchanting the bulls and bears of the Bourse is not clear to me, I can understand how M. Daniels, as a financial agent, should be lodging under our roof, but his daughter—­”

“She is our housekeeper, and, to tell the plain truth, madame, we have lived nicely, although money was scarce, since she ruled the roost.  Ah, these Jews are clever managers!”

Cesarine did not like the earnest tone of praise and hastened to say bluntly: 

“I suppose, then, she threw the spell over him again which once before, at Munich, caused him, a tame bookworm, to fight for her like a king-maker?”

“Mademoiselle Rebecca! she act the fascinatress!” exclaimed Hedwig, with a burst of indignation.

“What is there extraordinary, pray, in a husband, apparently deserted by his wife, paying attention to another handsome young woman?”

“Why, madame, you must forget that master is the most honorable gentleman as ever was, and that Mademoiselle Rebecca is a perfect lady!” Then, perceiving that her enthusiasm on the latter head was not welcome to the hearer, Hedwig, added:  “but it does not matter.  We are receiving no more company, lest the great secret leak out, and so we don’t need a lady at the table.  She is going away with her father, who is to open the Rifle Company’s offices in Paris, and that’s all!”

“It is quite enough!” remarked the other, frowning.

“What is the last word about him?” inquired the servant, “the viscount-baron, I mean.”

“M. de Terremonde?”

“Yes; you haven’t said a word about him.”

“Do you not know?” began Cesarine, shuddering as the scene in the twilight arose before her on the background of the sombre side of the room.