d gone
to Sir Tom. I thought it was he who could-- ... Happily, I have always
kept her in hand; and you, you have become her friend----"

"Madama," said Bice, with ironical politeness, "since it happens that
Milady is gone, shall I pour out for you your cup of tea?"

"Oh, tea! do I care for tea? when there are possibilities--possibilities!"
said the Contessa. She got up from her chair and began to pace about the
room, a grand figure in the gathering twilight. As for Bice, some demon of
perversity possessed her. She began to move about the tea-table, making
the china ring, and pouring out the tea as she had said, betook herself to
the eating of cake with a relish which was certainly much intensified by
the preoccupation of her patroness. She remembered well enough, very well,
what Jock had told her, and her own incredulity; but she would have died
rather than give a sign of this--and there was a tacit defiance in the way
in which she munched her cake under the Contessa's excited eyes, but this
was only a momentary perversity.

CHAPTER XXVII.

AN ADVENTURESS.

"When he told me first, I was angry like you, I would not believe it.
Money! that is a thing to keep, I said, not to give away."

"To give away!" Few things in all her life, at least in all her later
life, had so moved the Contessa. She was walking about the pretty room
in an excitement which was like agitation, now sitting down in one
place, now in another, turning over without knowing it the things on the
table, arranging a drapery here and there instinctively. To how few
people in the world would it be a matter of indifference that money, so
to speak, was going begging, and might fall into their hands as well as
another's! The best of us on this argument would prick up our ears.
Nobody cared less for money in itself than Madame di Forno-Populo. She
liked not to spend it only, but to squander--to make it fly on all
hands. To be utterly extravagant one must be poor, and the money hunger
which belongs to poverty is almost, one might say, a disinterested
quality, so little is it concerned with the possession of the thing
coveted. "Oh," she said, "this is too wonderful! and you are sure you
have not been deceived by the language? You know English so well--are
you sure that you were not deceived?"

Bice did not deign any reply to this question. She gave her head a
slight toss of scorn. The suggestion that she could be mistaken was
unworthy of an answer,