.

"'Madame ordered dinner,' said the woman. 'Madame dressed and ordered a
cab, and then she changed her mind and ordered it again for the theatre
this evening.'

"'Good,' exclaimed du Bruel, 'what did I tell you?'

"We entered the house stealthily. No one was there. We went from room to
room until we reached a little boudoir, and came upon Tullia in tears.
She dried her eyes without affectation, and spoke to du Bruel.

"'Send a note to the _Rocher de Cancale_,' she said, 'and ask your
guests to dine here.'

"She was dressed as only women of the theatre can dress, in a
simply-made gown of some dainty material, neither too costly nor too
common, graceful and harmonious in outline and coloring; there was
nothing conspicuous about her, nothing exaggerated--a word now dropping
out of use, to be replaced by the word 'artistic,' used by fools
as current coin. In short, Tullia looked like a gentlewoman. At
thirty-seven she had reached the prime of a Frenchwoman's beauty. At
this moment the celebrated oval of her face was divinely pale; she had
laid her hat aside; I could see a faint down like the bloom of fruit
softening the silken contours of a cheek itself so delicate. There was a
pathetic charm about her face with its double cluster of fair hair; her
brilliant gray eyes were veiled by a mist of tears; her nose, delicately
carved as a Roman cameo, with its quivering nostrils; her little
mouth, like a child's even now; her long queenly throat, with the veins
standing out upon it; her chin, flushed for the moment by some secret
despair; the pink tips of her ears, the hands that trembled under her
gloves, everything about her told of violent feeling. The feverish
twitching of her eyebrows betrayed her pain. She looked sublime.

"Her first words had crushed du Bruel. She looked at us both, with that
penetrating, impenetrable cat-like glance which only actresses and great
ladies can use. Then she held out her hand to her husband.

"'Poor dear, you had scarcely gone before I blamed myself a thousand
times over. It seemed to me that I had been horribly ungrateful. I told
myself that I had been unkind.--Was I very unkind?' she asked, turning
to me.--'Why not receive your friends? Is it not your house? Do you want
to know the reason of it all? Well, I was afraid that I was not loved;
and indeed I was half-way between repentance and the shame of going
back. I read the newspapers, and saw that there was a first night at
the Var