“But if the great passion comes?” cried Paul.
“Then it must come quick! Believe me, very quick. Petras Tetarnis is growing troublesome. And if it comes! Shall I tell you what will happen? She will blow her brains out! Oh, you may start in your chair. But look at her where she sits! There is the mark of fate already upon her face. It is written, as they say in this country.”
So to Henriette as to Gerard de Montignac and to Paul Ravenel, that indefinable look of destiny in Marguerite was evident. Paul asked himself whether it was not simply the outward and visible sign of that passionate self-respect which had kept her untarnished against the rush and play of the great passion when it came. Or was the future really written there—a history of great joys perhaps and great sorrows certainly to be?
“So Marguerite lives on seven francs a day and—”
She got no further. Paul interrupted her with an exclamation of horror.
“Yes. That is what our generous Madame Delagrange pays us each night and we provide our own dancing kit out of it. Oh, the little fool starves. That is certain—all the more certain because she will not let any of the clients here give her food.”
“But she let me,” cried Paul with a smile of pride.
“Yes, she let you to-night. But the others, never, never, lest—you understand? Lest they should make a claim.”
“Out of so small a service?” asked Paul incredulously.
“You have been lucky in your world,” she said. “The clients of the Villa Iris are not so generous. They will make a claim out of anything, as, by the way, most men will, if the claim may get them what they want. So that little one, since she will give herself to none of them, is wise to starve. You are the only one from whom she has taken food. It is curious, eh? It is because of that and because you treat me like a human being that I, Henriette, who like the little fool, ramble on so seriously to you to-night.”
The plastered face softened into tenderness and the bird-like eyes shone and filled suddenly with tears.
“It is kind of you,” said Paul. If any one had said to him a couple of hours before that he would have felt himself intensely privileged because a little dancing girl of the Villa Iris had taken supper from him and from him alone, he would have laughed his informant to scorn. But it was so. Paul was radiant with pride. He saw himself as a very fine fellow, a much finer fellow than he had ever believed himself to be. The loneliness of his boyhood, a sudden blow crushing his pride and his dreams in the dust, and years thereafter informed with a strong purpose to regain his name and his place in his own country, had combined to defer but had not slain his youth. It was back with him now, all the more ardent and dangerous from the restraint which had held it in check. Paul Ravenel was a boy of nineteen on this evening in the fire of his passion, but with the will and the experience of his own years; and he was old enough to hide any plans which he might be forming and to seek all the knowledge he could get from Henriette.