Moths by Ouida — page 89: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. 85 from my mother you do me, in your wish that I should marry you. Yet I wonder that you do wish it, because you know well that I have not that feeling for you which could make me care for or respect you. Please to take back this beautiful collar, which is too heavy for Loris. Loris I willalways keep, andIlam very fond of him. I should be glad if you would tell my mother that you have had this letter, and I beg you to believe me, © monsieur, yours gratefully, ey u % ERE HERBERT. She wrote the note several times, and thought that it would do. She did not like to write more coldly, lest she should seem heartless, and though her first impulse had been to look on the offer as an insult, perhaps he did not mean it so, she reflected; perhaps he did not understand how she disliked him. . She direct- ed her packet, and sealed it, and called her maid. ‘“* Will you take that to Monsieur Zouroff at once?” she said. ** Give it to him into his own hands.” The maid took the packet to her superior, Adrienne; Adrienne the wise took it to her mistress; Lady Dolly glanced at it and put it carelessly aside. ‘* Ah! the dog’s collar to go to Paris to be enlarged? very well; leave it there; it is of no consequence just now.” Adrienne the wise understood very well. ‘*Tf Mademoiselle ask you,” she instructed her underling, *‘you will say that Monsieur le Prince had the packet quite safe.” Ry: But Vere did not even ask, because she had not lived long enough in the world to doubt the good faith even of a waiting- maid. At Bulmer the servants were old-fashioned, like the place, and like the Waverley novels. They told the truth, as they wore boots that wanted blacking. If the little note had found its. way to Sergius Zouroff it might have touched his heart; it would have touched his pride, and Vere would have been left free. As it was, the packet reposed amidst Lady Dolly’s pocket-handkerchiefs and perfumes till it © was burnt with a pastille in the body of a Japanese dragon. Vere, quite tranquil, went to Le Caprice in the sunny after- noon, with her mother, never doubting that Prince Zouroff had had it. 3 She did not see him, and thought that it was because he had read her message and resented it. In point of fact she did not see him because he was at the maisonnette in the park, where the feminine portion of the troop had grown so quarrelsome and so exacting that they were threatening to make him a scene up at the chateau. ‘‘ What are your great ladies better than we?” they cried, in re- | volt. He granted that they were no better; nevertheless, the prejudices of society were so constituted that chateau and maisonnette could not meet, and he bade their director bundle them all back to Paris, like a cage of dangerous animals that . might at any moment escape. comicbooks.co