ruminate. "Should I be so forgiving--after last night?" she murmured.
"It would be inconsistent, wouldn't it?--or angelic? And I am no angel."

The girl's lips started to form a question but she did not speak. Afar,
Mr. Heatherbloom's figure could be seen, almost at the vanishing point.
He was toiling up an incline. Then the green foliage swallowed him.
Sonia Turgeinov smiled at vacancy. "Though I do owe him a little," she
went on, half meditative. "He _was_ kind to me in the park. He was sorry
for me. Think of it, and without admiring me. Other men have professed
for poor Sonia Turgeinov a little interest or solicitude at divers times
and places, but it has always been accompanied with something else. Is
that beyond the understanding of your pure soul, nourished in a
hothouse, Mademoiselle?" There was a sudden hard ring of rebellion in
her tones. "Am I handsome? Your eyes said it not long ago. _Ma foi_!"
Her voice becoming light again. "It was Parsifal himself who talked with
me in the park--that place for rendezvous and romances." Her thoughts
leaped over time and space. "The first light of the sun revealed to you
this day the last face you expected to see. It was as if a bit of
miracle, or a little diablerie had happened. I, too, was in a haze, not
so great--though on the deck the night before I little expected to
encounter one I had last seen in chains, a prisoner--"

"A prisoner--in chains--he--" Betty Dalrymple stared.

"You did not know? What on earth did you expect? That the prince would
give him the _suite de luxe_ after the beating his excellency
received--"

"The beating?" half-stammered the girl. "Then the man in the salon who
claimed to be a detective was--"

"What? He claimed that?" laughed Sonia Turgeinov. "_Tres drole!"_

But Betty Dalrymple did not laugh. Her eyes, bent seaward, saw nothing
now of the leaping waves; her face was fixed as a cameo's. Only her hair
stirred, wind-tossed, all in motion like her thoughts. And regarding
her, Sonia Turgeinov's eyes began to harden a little. Did the woman
regret for the moment what she had said, divining again some play within
a play? Yet what could there be in common between this beautiful heiress
and the _gardeurde chiens_? No! it was absurd to conceive anything of
the kind. Nevertheless Sonia Turgeinov unaccountably began to experience
a vague hostility for the young girl; this she might partly attribute to
the great gaps of convention separating them.