Ethel Watts Mumford

“ VI The following afternoon the vicomtesse drove over to La Bonbonnière. The day was clear, serene, and balmy. The smiling landscape, bathed in crystalline light, was reassuringly modern, yet her heart beat hard, and her hand tightened convulsively as, at last, the cheerful façade of the villa came into view. The horses trotted briskly around the circle to the porte-cochère. Jeanne descended daintily—a frivolous mass of ruffles and chiffon, from which her high-bred face looked out with curiosity not unmixed with fear. ”

“ Pourtant morte je ne seray——”
“Ah, no, she is not dead, thank God!” said d'Alencourt. “Though they buried her deep under an alien soil a hundred years ago—she had to come back to life, to France, and love!”
“No, no,” the vicomtesse shook her head with energy. “It isn't she! It is the influence that lives here—in La Bonbonnière. When they leave, it will lose its control over them. They will be what they were before. It is not the dead come back—it is their influence, their aura, their Karma, that has never died! ”

“ But isn't all love enchantment? Doesn't every one, when he loves, adore a phantom? Don't we all pursue a rainbow of the senses? Is my case any more impossible than a million others?”
“It is! It is!' she cried. “You must fight it down! We must save them! We must get them away! They must leave at once!”
“If you threaten that, I will proceed at once to carry her off, if I have to kidnap her. Her mother is my ally. I have already approached her. I think—I hope—Margot loves me. ”