The voice was high and chattering, with a tendency to crack.  It had the American quality with a French intonation.  In speaking, the Marquise made little nervous dashes, now to the right, now to the left, as though endeavoring to get by some one who blocked her way.

“I haven’t come on business, my—­my lady.”

He used this term of respect partly from a frightened desire to propitiate a great personage and partly because he couldn’t think of any other.

“Then what have you come on?  If it’s to see the chateau you may as well go away.  It’s never shown.  Those are positive orders.  I make no exceptions.  They must have told you so at the gate.  But you Americans will dare anything.  Mon Dieu, quel tas de barbares!”

The gesture of her hands in uttering the exclamation was altogether French, but she betrayed her oneness with the people she reviled by saying:  “Quel tah de bah-bah!”

“I haven’t come to see the chateau either, my lady—­”

“You can call me madame,” she interrupted, not without a kindlier inflection on the hint.

He began again.  “I haven’t come to see the chateau, either—­madame.  I’ve come to see you.”

She made one of her little plunges.  “Oh, indeed! Have you?  I thought you’d learned better than that—­over there.  You used to come in ship-loads, but—­”

He began to feel more sure of himself.  “When I say I came to see you, madame, I mean, I came to—­to tell you something.”

“Then, so long as it’s not on business, I don’t want to hear it.  I suppose you’re one of Walter Davenant’s boys?  I don’t consider him any relation to me at all.  It’s too distant.  If I acknowledged all the cousins forced on me from over there I might as well include Abraham and Adam.  Are you the first or the second wife’s son?”

He explained his connection with the Davenant name.  “But that isn’t what I came to talk about, madame—­not about myself.  I wanted to tell you of—­of your nephew—­Mr. Henry Guion.”

She turned with a movement like that of a fleeing nymph, her hand stretched behind her.  “Don’t.  I don’t want to hear about him.  Nor about my niece.  They’re strangers to me.  I don’t know them.”

“You’d like to know them now, madame—­because they’re in great trouble.”

She took refuge behind a big English arm-chair, leaning on the back.

“I dare say.  It’s what they were likely to come to.  I told my niece so, the last time she allowed me the privilege of her conversation.  But I told her, too, that in the day of her calamity she wasn’t to look to me.”

“She isn’t looking to you, madame. I am.  I’m looking to you because I imagine you can help her.  There’s no one else—­”

“And has she sent you as her messenger?  Why can’t she come herself, if it’s so bad as all that—­or write?  I thought she was married—­to some Englishman.”

“They’re not married yet, madame; and unless you help her I don’t see how they’re going to be—­the way things stand.”