“Because I will not pay the terms,” he answered even more gently, and stood with his cloak over his arm waiting his dismissal. “You _do_ scorn me,” she urged. “Believe me, Madame, no.” She paused and beat her foot on the ground. “I will go,” he said, “if you are willing.” “Stay,” she answered; “listen. There was one time--when you were on your knees to my image--when you _almost_ loved me, when you thought of me as your wife.” He coloured and did not move. “You thought I was too wealthy and too great a lady, but you had dreams of me. Just now, in the garden, you were ready for my signal.” “Well?” he said unsteadily. “Well?” “Would you make me your wife now?” Luc stared at her, the red deepening in his face. “M. de Richelieu would be willing,” she added. “Madame!” he cried. “I am noble.” Carola laughed. “I have touched you at last,” she answered feverishly. “You _do_ despise me.” Luc was silenced and convicted; there fell a silence neither could break. The brilliant sun was hidden by a cloud, and a greyness entered the gorgeous but dreary little room. “Good-bye,” said Carola at length. She rose, and so unsteadily that she had to catch hold of the sofa for aid; it slipped back under her hand, and the movement dragged the faded red drapery from the picture behind her. A brilliant oil-painting of a dark-haired woman clad in drapery ruffled by a light wind stepping through an undergrowth of fairy bushes with two hounds in leash, flashed out on Luc. Something stirred in his memory; he saw that the face was the face of Carola herself, younger, more blooming, and more gay. “Who painted that picture?” he asked. She looked swiftly over her shoulder; then went behind the sofa, picked up the drapery, and flung it over the heavy frame. “I thought it had been moved,” she murmured. “You were the model?” asked Luc. “And the subject is Bellona?” “Yes.” She looked bewildered. Luc saw again, very clearly, the old-fashioned chamber in Versailles and the young suicide lying there; he saw this picture perhaps even more vividly than the dark-eyed woman watching him from behind the striped settee. “What is the matter?” asked Carola heavily. Luc collected himself and took a step away from her while he looked at her with sudden flashing keenness. She was bare indeed now, bare of the last glamour of any illusion--“from the gutters of St. Antoine,” the dead man had said. Her brocades, her jewels, her paint now seemed to hang on her as so many rags that made no pretence to hide the stark crude thing they fluttered round. Luc could not believe that a little while before she had dazzled his vision--she was no longer even mysterious. He had nothing more to say to her; a weary disgust sealed his spirit; his face flushed with changes of thought, but he ended on silence. “Ah, you are moved now, I think,” said Carola, in her old precise tones--“by what, I wonder?” Luc put his hand on the door knob; he had nothing to say to her.