There were three at the table, and raven-locked too. But they made no sign. They knew only too well it was not of them he spoke.…The only velvet about the trio was on the upper lip of one of the three—a lip bearing a voluptuous shadowing of down, and for the moment, I can assure you, a well-marked expression of disdain.

‘…And a marquise three times over, just as pashas may be pashas of three tails,’ continued Ravila, who was getting into the swing of his narrative. ‘The marquise was one of those women who have no idea of hiding anything, and who, if they had, could never do it. Her daughter even, a child of thirteen, for all her youth and innocence, saw only too clearly the nature of the feeling the mother had for me. I know not which of our poets has asked what the girls think of us, the girls whose mothers we have loved. A deep question I often put to myself when I caught the child’s inquisitive gaze fixed black and menacing upon me from the ambush of her great, dark eyes.…A shy reserved creature, she would, more often than not, leave the drawing-room when I entered and, if obliged to remain, would invariably station herself as far away from me as possible; she had an almost convulsive horror of my person—which she strove to hide in her own bosom, but which was too strong for her, and betrayed itself against her will by little almost imperceptible signs. I noticed every one. The marquise, though anything but an observant woman, was for ever warning me: “You must take care, dearest, I think my girl is jealous of you…’

‘But I was taking much better care all the while than she was.

‘Had the little girl been the Devil himself I would have defied her to decipher my game.…But her mother’s was as clear as day. Everything was visible in the rosy mirror of her beautiful face, so often troubled by passing clouds! From the strange dislike the girl showed, I could not help thinking she had surprised her mother’s secret through some indiscreet burst of feeling, some involuntary look fraught with excess of tenderness. I may tell you she was a funny-looking child, quite unworthy of the glorious mould she had issued from, an ugly child, even by her mother’s admission, who only loved her the more for it. A little rough-cut topaz—how shall I describe it?—a half-finished sculptor’s study in bronze—but with eyes black as night, and having a strange, uncanny magic of their own. Later on…’

But here he stopped dead, as if regretting his burst of confidence, and fearful of having said too much.…Every face once more expressed an open, eager, vivid curiosity, and the countess, with a knowing air of pleased expectancy, actually dropped from between her lovely lips an expressive ‘At last!’

‘In the earlier days of my liaison with her mother,’ the Comte de Ravila resumed, ‘I had shown the child all the little fondling familiarities one has with children.…I used to bring her bags of sugared almonds; I used to call her my “little witch”, and very often, when talking to her mother, I would amuse myself with fingering the curls that hung over her temple—thin, sickly-looking curls, like black tow—but the “little witch”, whose big mouth had a pretty smile for everybody else, at once waxed pensive, her little face grew tense and rigid, the wrinkled mask of an overburdened caryatid, and as my hand brushed her forehead, it looked for all the world as though it bore the crushing weight of some vast entablature.

‘After a while, meeting invariably the same sullenness and apparent hostility, I took to leaving this sensitive plant alone which drew in its sad-coloured petals so violently at the least touch of a caress.…I even left off speaking to her! “She feels you are robbing her”, the marquise would say to me. “Her instinct tells her you are appropriating a portion of her mother’s love.” Sometimes she would add outright: “The child is my conscience, and her jealousy my remorse”.

‘Once the marquise had tried to question her as to the profound disfavour in which she held me, but she had got nothing out of her but the broken, obstinate, stupid answers you have to drag out with a corkscrew of reiterated questions from a child that prefers not to speak.…“Nothing is the matter.…I don’t know…” and so on. Finally, seeing how hard and obstinate the little image was, she had left off questioning her, and turned away in sheer weariness.

‘I forgot, by the by, to tell you one thing. The queer child was profoundly religious, in a gloomy, medieval, Spanish, superstitious sort of way. She twined around her meagre little person all kinds of scapularies