When May came into the room, however, it might have seemed that she had cunningly retained the old appointments as a setting to make more apparent by contrast her youthful fresh beauty. With her clear color, her dark hair, and sparkling eyes, she was the more bewitching amid this stately, sombre furniture, and in this gloomy old lofty room.
"My dear," Mrs. Neligage said, kissing her affectionately, "how well you look. I was dreadfully afraid I should find you worried and unhappy."
May returned her greeting less effusively, and seemed somewhat puzzled at this address.
"But why in the world should I look worried?" she asked.
Mrs. Neligage sat down, and regarded the other impressively in silence a moment before replying.
"Oh, my dear child," she said dramatically, "how could you be so imprudent?"
May became visibly paler, and in her turn sank into a chair.
"I don't know what you mean," she faltered.
"If you had lived in society abroad as much as I have, May," was the answer, delivered with an expressive shake of the head, "you would know how dreadfully a girl compromises herself by writing to a strange gentleman."
"The Count thinks the most horrible things," the widow went on mercilessly. "You know what foreigners are. It wouldn't have been so bad if it were an American."
Poor May put her hands together with a woeful gesture as if she were imploring mercy.
"Oh, is it the Count really?" she cried. "I saw that he had a red carnation in his buttonhole yesterday, but I hoped that it was an accident."
"A red carnation?" repeated Mrs. Neligage.
"Yes; that was the sign by which I was to know him. I said so in that letter."
It is to be doubted if the Recording Angel at that moment wrote down to the credit of Mrs. Neligage that she regretted having by chance stuck that flower in the Count's coat at the County Club.
"You poor child!" she murmured with a world of sympathy in her voice.
The touch was too much for May, who melted into tears. She was a simple-hearted little thing or she would never have written the unlucky letters to Christopher Calumus, and in her simplicity she had evidently fallen instantly into the trap set for her. She dabbed resolutely at her eyes with her handkerchief, but the fountain was too free to be so easily stanched.