Page:Hope--Sophy of Kravonia.djvu/76

SOPHY OF KRAVONIA copious superfluity of female friendliness—by Lady Meg, cloaking suspicious malignity under specious penitence; by Madame Mantis with impertinent and intrusive archness; by Marie Zerkovitch in the sheer impossibility of containing within herself any secret which had the bad fortune to be intrusted to her. Sophy's own confession, made with incredible difficulty—she hated the name so—fell flat and was greeted with a laugh of mockery.

It happened at the Calvaire at Fontainebleau, whither they had made a day's and night's excursion, under the escort of Marie Zerkovitch and a student friend of hers from the Quartier Latin. These two they had left behind sipping beer at a restaurant facing the chateau. On the eminence which commands the white little town dropped amid the old forest, over against the red roofs of the palace vying in richness with the turning leaves, in sight of a view in its own kind unsurpassed, in its own charm unequalled, Sophy broke the brutal truth which was to end the infatuation of the head of a house old as St. Louis.

"It's bad to pronounce, is it?" asked Casimir, smiling and touching her hand. "Ah, well, good or bad, I couldn't pronounce it, so to me it is nothing."

"They'd all say it was terrible—a mésalliance."

"I fear only one voice on earth saying that."

"And the fraud I am—de Gruche!" She caught his hand tightly. Never before had it occurred to her to defend or to excuse the transparent fiction.

"I know stars fall," he said, with his pretty gravity, not too grave. "I wish that they may rise to their own height again—and I rise with them."

The sun sank behind the horizon. A gentle afterglow of salmon-pink rested over the palace and city; 58