She was not with the rest of the little company when Calvert once more entered the Legation. He found her in an upper chamber, where she stood alone beside an open window, looking out on the agitation and tumult of the city below. She had doffed her travel-stained boy's clothes and now wore a dress, which Madame de Montmorin had offered her, of some soft black stuff that fell in heavy folds about her slender young figure. As he entered she turned, hearing the sound, and their eyes met. He stood silent, trying to fathom the strange look on that pale face. It was the same beautiful face that he had seen in pictured loveliness that last night at Monticello, the same that he had seen in reality for the first time at Mr. Jefferson's levee at the Legation, and yet how changed! All the haughty pride, the caprice, the vanity, the artificiality were gone, and instead, upon the finely chiselled features and in the blue eyes, rested a serene, if melancholy beauty, a quiet nobility born of suffering. There rushed through Calvert's mind the thought that, after all, that loveliness had at last developed into all that was best and finest.
He stood thus looking at her in silence and thinking of these things, and then he went slowly forward, scarce knowing how to address her or explain his presence, who had so long avoided her.
"I am come," he says, at length, "to thank you for the great service that you have this night rendered me and those other gentlemen engaged with myself in the King's business. I dare not think what might have been the fate of us all had you not come to our assistance. Were they here they would, like myself, thank you with all their hearts."
"'Twas no great service," she says, "and I could scarce have done less for one who has done so much--who has sacrificed so much for me."
"I have sacrificed nothing," says Calvert, in a low, compassionate voice. "'Twas you who sacrificed yourself, and all in vain! Believe me, I suffered for you in that knowledge. I should not have let you--should have found a way, but I was weak and ill and scarcely struggled against the fate that gave you to me. I wish that 'twere as easy to undo the evil as for you to forget me."
"Forget you! I wish I could forget you. I have thought of you so much that sometimes I wish I could forget you entirely. But I think 'tis out of my power to do so now. I think I should have to be quite dead--and even then I do not know--I am not sure--if you should speak to me I think I would hear," she says, wildly, and covering her eyes with her hand.
