Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/105

Rh She curtseyed anew. “So I see, Monsieur!” she answered. “I am flattered!” But she did not advance, and gradually, light-headed as he was, he began to see that she looked at him with an odd closeness. And he took offence.

“I say, Madame, I have come to you!” he repeated. “And you do not seem pleased!”

She came forward a step and looked at him still more oddly.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I am pleased, M. de Tignonville. It is what I intended. But tell me how you have fared. You are not hurt?”

“Not a hair!” he cried boastfully. And he told her in a dozen windy sentences of the adventure of the haycart and his narrow escape. He wound up with a foolish meaningless laugh.

“Then you have not eaten for thirty-six hours?” she said. And when he did not answer, “I understand,” she continued, nodding and speaking as to a child. And she rang a silver handbell and gave an order.

She addressed the servant in her usual tone, but to Tignonville’s ear her voice seemed to fall to a whisper. Her figure—she was small and fairy-like—began to sway before him; and then in a moment, as it seemed to him, she was gone, and he was seated at a table, his trembling fingers grasping a cup of wine which the elderly servant who had admitted him was holding to his lips. On the table before him were a spit of partridges and a cake of white bread. When he had swallowed a second mouthful of wine—which cleared his eyes as by magic—the man urged him to eat. And he fell to with an appetite that grew as he ate.

By-and-by, feeling himself again, he became aware that two of Madame’s women were peering at him through the open doorway. He looked that way and they fled giggling