FullReads

“Confess that I have done a great deal for you!” she exclaimed, making room for him on a sofa judiciously screened from the observation of the other rooms.

“In coming to dine with my cousin?” he enquired, answering her smile.

“Let us say, in giving you this half hour.”

“For that I am duly grateful–and shall be still more so when I know what it contains for me.”

“Ah, I am not sure. You will not like what I am going to say.”

“Shall I not?” he rejoined, changing colour.

She raised her eyes from the thoughtful contemplation of her painted fan. “You appear to have no idea of the difficulties.”

“Should I have asked your help if I had not had an idea of them?”

“But you are still confident that with my help you can surmount them?”

“I can’t believe you have come here to take that confidence from me?”

She leaned back, smiling at him through her lashes. “And all this I am to do for your beaux yeux?”

“No–for your own: that you may see with them what happiness you are conferring.”

“You are extremely clever, and I like you.” She paused, and then brought out with lingering emphasis: “But my family will not hear of a divorce.”

She threw into her voice such an accent of finality that Durham, for the moment, felt himself brought up against an insurmountable barrier; but, almost at once, his fear was mitigated by the conviction that she would not have put herself out so much to say so little.

“When you speak of your family, do you include yourself?” he suggested.

She threw a surprised glance at him. “I thought you understood that I am simply their mouthpiece.”

At this he rose quietly to his feet with a gesture of acceptance. “I have only to thank you, then, for not keeping me longer in suspense.”

His air of wishing to put an immediate end to the conversation seemed to surprise her. “Sit down a moment longer,” she commanded him kindly; and as he leaned against the back of his chair, without appearing to hear her request, she added in a low voice: “I am very sorry for you and Fanny–but you are not the only persons to be pitied.”

She had dropped her light manner as she might have tossed aside her fan, and he was startled at the intimacy of misery to which her look and movement abruptly admitted him. Perhaps no Anglo-Saxon fully understands the fluency in self-revelation which centuries of the confessional have given to the Latin races, and to Durham, at any rate, Madame de Treymes’ sudden avowal gave the shock of a physical abandonment.

“I am so sorry,” he stammered–“is there any way in which I can be of use to you?”

She sat before him with her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on his in a terrible intensity of appeal. “If you would–if you would! Oh, there is nothing I would not do for you. I have still a great deal of influence with my mother, and what my mother commands we all do. I could help you–I am sure I could help you; but not if my own situation were known. And if nothing can be done it must be known in a few days.”

Durham had reseated himself at her side. “Tell me what I can do,” he said in a low tone, forgetting his own preoccupations in his genuine concern for her distress.

She looked up at him through tears. “How dare I? Your race is so cautious, so self-controlled–you have so little indulgence for the extravagances of the heart. And my folly has been incredible–and unrewarded.” She paused, and as Durham waited in a silence which she guessed to be compassionate, she brought out below her breath: “I have lent money–my husband’s, my brother’s–money that was not mine, and now I have nothing to repay it with.”

Durham gazed at her in genuine astonishment. The turn the conversation had taken led quite beyond his uncomplicated experiences with the other sex. She saw his surprise, and extended her hands in deprecation and entreaty. “Alas, what must you think of me? How can I explain my humiliating myself before a stranger? Only by telling you the whole truth–the fact that I am not alone in this disaster, that I could not confess my situation to my family without ruining myself, and involving in my ruin some one who, however undeservedly, has been as dear to me as–as you are to–“