“Now, by his salvation and mine,” she cried, “I will do what he asks.  I will go to him.  He thinks his heart is dry to me.  I will show him!  I will show him!” She opened her arms with a sweep.  “Tell me,” she cried, “am I old?  Am I the nun you looked for?” Her voice pealed scornfully.  “Scarlet,” she said; “I will go to him in scarlet, as he pictured me when I posed for ‘The Dancer!’ His pulses shall welcome me; his soul was in its grave when I was in my cradle.”

O’Neill had risen too.  “Senora,” he protested, “you must consider—­ he is a dying man!”

He spoke to her back.  Laughing again, she had turned from him to the gilt shrine and plucked a flower from it.  She was fixing it in her hair when she faced him.

“To-night,” she said, “we travel north.  You are”—­she paused, smiling—­“you are my impresario, and Lola—­Lola makes her curtsy again!”

She caught her black skirt in her hand and curtsied to him with an extravagant grace.

That was a strange journey to Paris that O’Neill made with the Senora.  He had seen her humor change swiftly in response to his appeal; what was surprising was that that new humor should maintain its nervous height.  It was soon enough apparent that the Lola of twenty years before lived yet, her flamboyant energy, her unstable caprice, her full-blooded force conserved and undiminished.  It was like the bursting of one of those squalls that come up with a breathless loom of cloud, hang still and brooding, and then flash without warning into tempest.  She faced him at the station with an electric vivacity; her voice was harsh and imperious to her servants who put her into the train and disposed of her luggage.  It occurred to O’Neill that she traveled well equipped; there were boxes and baskets in full ampleness.  When at last the train tooted its little horn and started, she flung herself down in the seat facing him and broke into shrill laughter.

“It is the second advent of Lola,” she cried.  “There should be a special train for me.”

Her dress was still of black, but it had suffered some change O’Neill did not trouble to define.  He saw that it no longer had the formal plainness of the gown she had worn earlier.  It achieved an effect.  But the main change was in the woman herself.  It was impossible to think of her and her years in the same breath.  She had cast the long restraint from her completely; all her sad days of quiet were obliterated.  She was once again the stormy, uneasy thing that had dominated her loose world, a vital and indomitable personality untempered by reason or any conscience.  Even when she sat still and seemingly deep in thought, one felt and deferred to the magnetism and power that were expressed in every feature of that dark and alert face.

O’Neill deemed himself fortunate that she did not speak of Regnault till Paris lay but a few hours away.  The whirlwind of her mood was a thing that did not touch him, but it would have been mere torment to battle on with that one topic.  When she did speak of him it was with the suddenness with which she approached everything.  She had been silent for nearly an hour, gazing through the window at the scurrying landscape.