“You did not send me these?  Not as payment for the chess service?”

“Absolutely not.  After what you said the other day, I should have scarcely been so ill-bred and so heedless of inflicting pain.  Who used my name thus?”

His face lightened with a pleasure and a relief that changed it wonderfully; that brighter look of gladness had been a stranger to it for so many years.

“You give me infinite happiness, madame.  You little dream how bitter such slights are where one has lost the power to resent them!  It was M. de Chateauroy, who this morning—­”

“Dared to tell you I sent you those coins?”

The serenity of a courtly woman of the world was unbroken, but her blue and brilliant eyes darkened and gleamed beneath the sweep of their lashes.

“Perhaps I can scarcely say so much.  He gave them, and he implied that he gave them from you.  The words he spoke were these.”

He told her them as they had been uttered, adding no more; she saw the construction they had been intended to bear, and that which they had borne naturally to his ear; she listened earnestly to the end.  Then she turned to him with the exquisite softness of grace which, when she was moved to it, contrasted so vividly with the haughty and almost chill languor of her habitual manner.

“Believe me, I regret deeply that you should have been wounded by this most coarse indignity; I grieve sincerely that through myself in any way it should have been brought upon you.  As for the perpetrator of it, M. de Chateauroy will be received here no more; and it shall be my care that he learns not only how I resent his unpardonable use of my name, but how I esteem his cruel outrage to a defender of his own Flag.  You did exceedingly well and wisely to acquaint me; in your treatment of it as an affront that I was without warrant to offer you, you showed the just indignation of a soldier, and—­of what I am very sure that you are—­a gentleman.”

He bowed low before her.

“Madame, you have made me the debtor of my enemy’s outrage.  Those words from you are more than sufficient compensation for it.”

“A poor one, I fear!  Your Colonel is your enemy, then?  And wherefore?”

He paused a moment.

“Why, at first, I scarcely know.  We are antagonistic, I suppose.”

“But is it usual for officers of his high grade to show such malice to their soldiers?”

“Most unusual.  In this service especially so; although officers rising from the ranks themselves are more apt to contract prejudices and ill feeling against, as they are to feel favoritism to, their men, than where they enter the regiment in a superior grade at once.  At least, that is the opinion I myself have formed; studying the working of the different systems.”

“You know the English service, then?”

“I know something of it.”

“And still, though thinking this, you prefer the French?”