s were all joy, all
happiness, and sparks flew from them. She was under the charm, and
fearlessly intoxicated herself with a felicity of which she had dreamed
long. She seemed then so marvelously beautiful to Henri, that all this
phantasmagoria of rags and old age, of worn red drapery and of the green
mats in front of the armchairs, the ill-washed red tiles, all this sick
and dilapidated luxury, disappeared.

The room seemed lit up; and it was only through a cloud that one could
see the fearful harpy fixed and dumb on her red sofa, her yellow eyes
betraying the servile sentiments, inspired by misfortune, or caused by
some vice beneath whose servitude one has fallen as beneath a tyrant who
brutalizes one with the flagellations of his despotism. Her eyes had the
cold glitter of a caged tiger, knowing his impotence and being compelled
to swallow his rage of destruction.

"Who is that woman?" said Henri to Paquita.

But Paquita did not answer. She made a sign that she understood no
French, and asked Henri if he spoke English.

De Marsay repeated his question in English.

"She is the only woman in whom I can confide, although she has sold me
already," said Paquita, tranquilly. "My dear Adolphe, she is my mother,
a slave bought in Georgia for her rare beauty, little enough of which
remains to-day. She only speaks her native tongue."

The attitude of this woman and her eagerness to guess from the gestures
of her daughter and Henri what was passing between them, were suddenly
explained to the young man; and this explanation put him at his ease.

"Paquita," he said, "are we never to be free then?"

"Never," she said, with an air of sadness. "Even now we have but a few
days before us."

She lowered her eyes, looked at and counted with her right hand on the
fingers of her left, revealing so the most beautiful hands which Henri
had ever seen.

"One, two, three----"

She counted up to twelve.

"Yes," she said, "we have twelve days."

"And after?"

"After," she said, showing the absorption of a weak woman before the
executioner's axe, and slain in advance, as it were, by a fear which
stripped her of that magnificent energy which Nature seemed to have
bestowed upon her only to aggrandize pleasure and convert the most
vulgar delights into endless poems. "After----" she repeated. Her eyes
took a fixed stare; she seemed to contemplate a threatening object far
away.

"I do not know," she said.

"This girl is mad," sa