He glanced at the countess. He was too experienced a man to be
tricked. The countess was really asleep. Her cap was on one side, her
mouth open. A woman who is pretending to sleep usually does so in
becoming attitudes.
De Chauxville did not speak again for some minutes. He sat back in his
chair, leaning his forehead on his hand, while he peeped through his
slim fingers. He could almost read the girl's thoughts as she put them
into music.
"She does not hate him yet," he was reflecting. "But she needs only to
see him with Etta a few times and she will come to it."
The girl played on, throwing all the pain in her passionate, untamed
heart into the music. She knew nothing of the world; for half of its
temptations, its wiles, its wickednesses were closed to her by the plain
face that God had given her. For beautiful women see the worst side of
human nature--they usually deal with the worst of men. Catrina was an
easy tool in the hands of such as Claude de Chauxville; for he had dealt
with women and that which is evil in women all his life, and the only
mistakes he ever made were those characteristic errors of omission
attaching to a persistent ignorance of the innate good in human nature.
It is this same innate good that upsets the calculations of most
villains.
Absorbed as she was in her great grief, Catrina was in no mood to seek
for motives--to split a moral straw.
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