"Is it permitted to admire Madame's horsemanship?" he asked, with a
little bow.
Diana coloured faintly and twisted the jade necklace round her fingers
nervously. "It is nothing," she said, with a shy smile that his
sympathetic personality evoked in spite of herself. "With The Dancer it
is all foolishness and not vice. One has to hold on very tightly. It
would have been humiliating to precipitate myself at the feet of a
stranger. Monseigneur would not have approved of the concession to The
Dancer's peculiarities. It is an education to ride his horses,
Monsieur."
"It is a strain to the nerves to ride beside some of them,"
replied the Vicomte pointedly.
Diana laughed with pure amusement. The man whose coming she had loathed
was making the dreadful ordeal very easy for her. "I sympathise,
Monsieur. Was Shaitan very vile?"
"If Monsieur de Saint Hubert is trying to suggest to you that he
suffers from nerves, Diane," broke in the Sheik, with a laugh,
"disabuse yourself at once. He has none."
Saint Hubert turned to him with a quick smile. "Et toi, Ahmed,
eh? Do you remember----?" and he plunged into a flood of reminiscences
that lasted until the end of dinner.
The Vicomte had brought with him a pile of newspapers and magazines,
and Diana curled up on the divan with an armful, hungry for news, but,
somehow, as she dipped into the batch of papers her interest waned.
After four months of complete isolation it was difficult to pick up the
threads of current events, allusions were incomprehensible, and
controversies seemed pointless. The happenings of the world appeared
tame beside the great adventure that was carrying her on irresistibly
and whose end she could not see and dared not think of. She pushed them
aside carelessly and kept only on her knee a magazine that served as a
pretext for her silence.
When Gaston brought coffee the Vicomte hailed him with a gay laugh.
"Enfin, Gaston, after two years the nectar of the gods again!
There is a new machine for you amongst my things, mon ami,
providing it has survived Henri's packing."
He brought a cup to Diana and set it on a stool beside her. "Ahmed
flatters himself I come to see him, Madame. I do not. I come to drink
Gaston's coffee. It has become proverbial, the coffee of Gaston. I
propitiate him every time I come with a new apparatus for making it.
The last is a marvel of ingenuity. Excuse me, I go to drink it with the
reverence it inspires. It is a rite, Madame, not a gastronomic
indulgence."