e
playfully. "Ah, ah, trust you to have penetrated his disguise, my
child!"

She shrank resentfully from that implication.

"But I did not. I took him for what he seemed."

Her father winked at her very solemnly and laughed. "To be sure, you
did. But like your father, who was once a gentleman, and knows the ways
of gentlemen, you detected in him a subtle something different from
those with whom misfortune has compelled you hitherto to herd. You knew
as well as I did that he never caught that trick of haughtiness, that
grand air of command, in a lawyer's musty office, and that his speech
had hardly the ring or his thoughts the complexion of the bourgeois that
he pretended to be. And it was shrewd of you to have made him yours. Do
you know that I shall be very proud of you yet, Climene?"

She moved away without answering. Her father's oiliness offended her.
Scaramouche was clearly a great gentleman, an eccentric if you please,
but a man born. And she was to be his lady. Her father must learn to
treat her differently.

She looked shyly--with a new shyness--at her lover when he came into the
room where they were dining. She observed for the first time that proud
carriage of the head, with the chin thrust forward, that was a trick of
his, and she noticed with what a grace he moved--the grace of one who in
youth has had his dancing-masters and fencing-masters.

It almost hurt her when he flung himself into a chair and exchanged
a quip with Harlequin in the usual manner as with an equal, and it
offended her still more that Harlequin, knowing what he now knew, should
use him with the same unbecoming familiarity.

CHAPTER IX. THE AWAKENING

"Do you know," said Climene, "that I am waiting for the explanation
which I think you owe me?"

They were alone together, lingering still at the table to which
Andre-Louis had come belatedly, and Andre-Louis was loading himself a
pipe. Of late--since joining the Binet Troupe--he had acquired the habit
of smoking. The others had gone, some to take the air and others, like
Binet and Madame, because they felt that it were discreet to leave
those two to the explanations that must pass. It was a feeling that
Andre-Louis did not share. He kindled a light and leisurely applied it
to his pipe. A frown came to settle on his brow.

"Explanation?" he questioned presently, and looked at her. "But on what
score?"

"On the score of the deception you have practised on us--on me."

"I