The Duchess held both her hands for a moment, admiring her, and, presently, with a playful remark upon her unselfishness, left her alone with Lord Windlehurst.
As they talked, his mask-like face became lighted from the brilliant fire in the inquisitorial eyes, his lips played with topics of the moment in a mordant fashion, which drew from her flashing replies. Looking at her, he was conscious of the mingled qualities of three races in her--English, Welsh, and American-Dutch of the Knickerbocker strain; and he contrasted her keen perception and her exquisite sensitiveness with the purebred Englishwomen round him, stately, kindly, handsome, and monotonously intelligent.
“Now I often wonder,” he said, conscious of, but indifferent to, the knowledge that he and the brilliant person beside him were objects of general attention--“I often wonder, when I look at a gathering like this, how many undiscovered crimes there are playing about among us. They never do tell--or shall I say, we never do tell?”
All day, she knew not why, Hylda had been nervous and excited. Without reason his words startled her. Now there flashed before her eyes a room in a Palace at Cairo, and a man lying dead before her. The light slowly faded out of her eyes, leaving them almost lustreless, but her face was calm, and the smile on her lips stayed. She fanned herself slowly, and answered nonchalantly: “Crime is a word of many meanings. I read in the papers of political crimes--it is a common phrase; yet the criminals appear to go unpunished.”
“There you are wrong,” he answered cynically. “The punishment is, that political virtue goes unrewarded, and in due course crime is the only refuge to most. Yet in politics the temptation to be virtuous is great.”
She laughed now with a sense of relief. The intellectual stimulant had brought back the light to her face. “How is it, then, with you--inveterate habit or the strain of the ages? For they say you have not had your due reward.”
He smiled grimly. “Ah, no, with me virtue is the act of an inquiring mind--to discover where it will lead me. I began with political crime--I was understood! I practise political virtue: it embarrasses the world, it fogs them, it seems original, because so unnecessary. Mine is the scientific life. Experiment in old substances gives new--well, say, new precipitations. But you are scientific, too. You have a laboratory, and have much to do--with retorts.”