'She could think nothing of the sort,' said Othmar. 'They are three words which no one could associate with Mdlle. de Valogne; I am delighted my deserted house could be so honoured. Must you go? I shall not easily forgive myself if I frighten you away. Let me come with you to the gate at least.'
He walked beside her under the palms and on the shaven grass down an aisle of clipped arbutus, carrying for her the camellias, white and rose, which he had broken off their plants with no care for the appearance of the group to which they belonged.
She was silent; she was subdued by an unwonted sense of wrong-doing; she fancied that she had committed some terrible indiscretion; but how was she to have known that he was there, when for three winters the camellias had blossomed unseen in those silent evergreen ways, which no step but a gardener's had ever disturbed, and where she had come to watch the blackbirds trip over the fallen leaves, and the fountains dance in the sunshine, and the tea-roses shower petals of cream and of gold on the terraces, with no more thought or hesitation than she had gone to the olive-yards of Nicole Sandros? Her confusion had nothing of awkwardness. It was very graceful, almost stately, in its silence; it was the grave innocence, the startled hesitation, of the young nymph surprised in the sanctuary of the grove.
She accepted the orchids with a serious gratitude, which seemed to him quite out of proportion to the slenderness of the gift; but when he said as much she interrupted him:
'They are so beautiful,' she said earnestly. 'It seems cruel to have plucked them. One fancies they will take wing like the butterflies.'
'Oh yes--and people waste them so. At my cousin's ball last week there were five thousand roses. I saw them in the morning; they were quite dead.'
'At night, no; how could I? I am not in the world; I never shall be. Sometimes they tell me to be an hour in the reception-rooms after dinner; that is all; I do not care for it.'
'But do you not wish for the time of balls to come? Every young girl does.'
'I try never to think about it,' she said simply. 'I know it will never come for me.'
There was a resignation in her words which was more pathetic than any regrets.