Moths by Ouida — page 209: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

> i MOTHS, s 208 ified by promises of the Chef de Surete and his myrmidons. But she stormed, raged, cursed, wept, foamed at the mouth, for half-an hour, and then—forgot the Prefet de Police, and let herself be taken down to Enghien-les-Bains in time for din- ner by a German margrave, whom she pillaged from patriot- ism, and with whom she stayed a whole week. The Duchesse Jeanne, excruciatingly tired as she was the next morning, felt her spirits good, and her limbs elastic, as she got into her red and black stripes and red cap—vrai bon- nel rouge, as she said—and displayed her skill in the waters + tl of Trouville, and on them with her canoe. She had gota — | clew to follow—a mere misty, intangible thread at present, but still something en which to spin her web. ‘‘Correze was.the hero of the adventure of the lost shoes and stockings; and what adventure is ever so sweet in a woman’s life as the first?” thought this experienced being, as she lay stretched out on the waves, or made her canoe shoot over them. ‘‘Correze comes for a few hours down here; that very day she aN drives off before we are up, and makes her pilgrimage to the vd place of the lost shoes; when we interrogate her she colors 3 and grows angry: he takes Neisette’s pavilion—Noisette’s, di whom he detests: I have heard artists say so a hundred times, He is charming, he is exquisite, he is adorable; and all within a few yards of Vere, to whom he nevertheless never speaks! Something there must be. Thethingtodois tobring them near each other; then one would see inevitably.” And, lying on her back on the sunny water, she resolved to do so. What did she want? She did not know precisely. She wanted todo what the moths do to ermine. CHAPTER XIX. PRETTY, green Ischl was growing dusky in the evening hours. Ischl, like a young girl, is prettiest inthe morning. Its morning licht is radiant and sweet; of the sunset it sees little or nothing, and its evenings aresad-colored; the moon seems a long time com- ing up over these heights of pine forest, but, when it does come, 16 is very fair, shining on the ripple of the rapid Traun, with the lights of the houses on the banks twinkling in the moss-green surface of the stream, with every now and then a gentle splash breaking the silence as the ferry- boat goes over from side to side or a washing-barge is moored in closer to the shore. | Ischl is calm, and sedate, and decorous. Ischl is like some tender, wholesome, yet patrician beauty in a German picture, like the pretty aristocratic Charlotte in Kaulbach’s picture, who euts the bread-and-butter yet looks a patrician. Ischl has noth- ing of the belle petite, like her sister of Baden, nothing ofthe titled cocodette, like her cousin Monaco, Ischl does not gamble, or riot, er conduct herself madly in any way; she is a little, old-fashioned still, in a courtly way; she has a little rusticity still in her elegant — manners; shie is homely whilst she is so visibly of the fine fleur of the vieille souche. gui She is like the noble dames of the past ages, who were so high A | Vi : »~comicbooks.com — i eae