Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/338

Rh wouldn't—he had too many bills of Blanche Souris' to pay; and poor Maurice couldn't—he invariably lost at play much more than he possessed, after the manner of his generation.

Madame Mila really cried about it, and felt ready to promise any amount of repentance if she could get those sixty thousand francs this Lent.

"And to think of me running myself off my feet in that muslin apron collecting for the poor!" she thought, with a sense that heaven behaved very ill to her in return for her charities. "I suppose I must ask Hilda," she reflected; "she always does give when you ask her—if that man don't prevent her now."

For the champagne and the mask and the great joyousness of her soul had prevented Madame Mila from observing any difference between her cousin and Della Rocca, and as he had left the box immediately after her cousin, she had supposed that they had gone away together—why shouldn't they?

"I must ask Hilda to lend it me," she said to herself.

To say lend was agreeable to her feelings, not