"Oh yes," he said slowly, "I certainly felt the same at the time. Still, his present way of going on looks very odd. It doesn't seem to me that of an innocent man. Why should he compel his wife to lead such a life as that she evidently does lead at St. Germains?"
"But how young she still looks," said Madame Sampiero eagerly. "I really think she's as pretty as ever!"
"H'm!" he said. "Rather faded--at least so I thought. And then,--another notion of Richard's no doubt,--there seemed something wrong about her dress."
Barbara Sampiero laughed. "You are quite right," she said, "but how odd that you should have noticed it! Richard won't allow her to wear a crinoline! Isn't he absurd? But she hasn't changed a bit. She loves him as much as ever--nay, more than ever, and that, Julian,"--again their hands clasped,--"is, you must admit, very rare and touching after all that has come and gone."
But each of the speakers felt that this visit to St. Germains had been vaguely disappointing, that it had not yielded all they had hoped it would do.
Barbara Sampiero made up her mind that before leaving Paris she would come again, and come alone. She did not carry out her good resolution, and many long years were to pass by before she and her god-daughter met again. And to both, by the time of that second meeting, St. Germains had become a place peopled with sad ghosts and poignant memories which both strove rather to forget than to remember.
"Mon pauvre coeur maladroit, mon coeur plein de révolte et d'espérance...."
"The past is death's, the future is thine own."
Fifteen years had gone by since the eventful birthday and meeting at St. Germains.
As Barbara Rebell, still Barbara Rebell, though she had been a wife, a most unhappy wife, for six years, stepped from the small dark vestibule into the dimly-lighted hall of Chancton Priory, her foot slipped on the floor; and she would have fallen had not a man's hand, small but curiously bony and fleshless, grasped her right arm, while, at the same moment, a deep voice from out the darkness exclaimed, "A good omen! So stumbled the Conqueror!"
The accent in which the odd words were uttered would have told a tale as to the speaker's hard-bitten nationality to most English-speaking folk: not so to the woman to whom they were addressed. Yet they smote on her ear as though laden with welcome, for they recalled the voice of a certain Andrew Johnstone, the Scotch Governor of the West Indian island of Santa Maria, whose brotherly kindness and unobtrusive sympathy had been more comfortable to her, in a moment of great humiliation and distress, than his English wife's more openly expressed concern and more eagerly offered friendship.