Brandolin walks down the opening between the glass doors into the garden. He paces impatiently the green shady walks where he has seen her on other mornings than this. It is lovely weather, and the innumerable roses fill the warm moist air with fragrance. There is a sea-breeze blowing from the sea-coast some thirty miles away; his schooner is in harbor there; he thinks that it would be wisest to go to it and sail away again for as many thousand miles as he has just left behind him. Xenia Sabaroff has a great and growing influence over him, and he does not wish her to exercise it and increase it if this thing be true: perhaps, after all, she may be that kind of sorceress of which Mary Stuart is the eternal type,—cold only that others may burn, reculant pour mieux sauter, exquisitely feminine only to be more dangerously powerful. He does not wish to play the rÔle of Chastelard, or of Douglas, or of Henry Darnley. He is stung to the quick by what he has heard said.

It is not new: since the arrival of Gervase the same thing has been hinted more or less clearly, more or less obscurely, within his hearing more than once; but the matter-of-fact words of Litroff have given the tale a kind of circumstantiality and substance which the vague uncertain suggestions of others did not do. Litroff has, obviously, no feeling against her; he even speaks of her with reluctance and admiration: therefore his testimony has a truthfulness about it which would be lacking in any mere malicious scandal.

It is intensely painful to him to believe, or even to admit to himself as possible, that it may be thus true. She seems to him a very queen among women: all the romance of his temperament clothes her with ideal qualities. He walks on unconsciously till he has left the west garden and entered the wood which joins it, and the grassy seats made underneath the boughs. As he goes, his heart thrills, his pulse quickens: he sees Madame Sabaroff. She is seated on one of the turf banks, reading, the dog of the house at her feet. He has almost walked on to her before he has perceived her.

"I beg your pardon," he murmurs, and pauses, undecided whether to go or stay.

She looks at him a little surprised at the ceremony of his manner.

"For what do you beg my pardon? You are as free of the wood as I," she replies, with a smile. "I promised the children to keep their dogs quiet, and to await them here as they return from their church."

"You are too good to the children," says Brandolin, still with restraint. Her eyes open with increased surprise. She has never seen his manner, usually so easy, nonchalant, and unstudied, altered before.

"He must have heard bad news," she thinks, but says nothing, and keeps her book open.

Brandolin stands near, silent and absorbed. He is musing what worlds he would give, if he had them, to know whether the story is true! He longs passionately to ask her in plain words, but it would be too brutal and too rude; he has not known her long enough to be able to presume to do so.

He watches the sunshine fall through the larch boughs on to her hands in their long loose gloves and touch the pearls which she always wears at her throat.

"How very much he is unlike himself!" she thinks; she misses his spontaneous and picturesque eloquence, his warm abandon of manner, his caressing deference of tone. At that moment there is a gleam of white between the trees, a sound of voices in the distance.

The family party are returning from church. The dogs jump up and wag their tails and bark their welcome. The Babe is dashing on in advance. There is an end of their brief tÊte-À-tÊte; he passionately regrets the loss of it, though he is not sure of what he would have said in it.

"Always together!" says Dulcia Waverley, in a whisper, to Usk, as she sees them. "Does he know that he succeeds Lord Gervase, do you think?"

"How should I know?" says Usk; "and Dolly says there was nothing between her and Gervase,—nothing; at least it was all in honor, as the French say."

"Oh, of course," agrees Lady Waverley, with her plaintive eyes gazing dreamily down the aisle of larch-trees. The children have run on to Madame Sabaroff.

"Where is Alan?" thinks Dolly Usk, angrily, on seeing Brandolin.

Gervase, who is not an early riser, is then taking his coffee in bed as twelve strikes. He detests an English Sunday: although at Surrenden it is disguised as much as possible to look like any other day, still there is a Sunday feeling in the air, and Usk does not like people to play cards on Sundays: it is his way of being virtuous vicariously.

"Primitive Christianity," says Brandolin, touching the white feathers of Dodo's hat and the white lace on her short skirts.

"We only go to sleep," replies the child, disconsolately. "We might just as well go to sleep at home; and it is so hot in that pew, with all that red cloth!"

"My love!" says Dulcia Waverley, scandalized.

"Lady Waverley don't go to sleep!" cries the Babe, in his terribly clear little voice. "She was writing in her hymn-book and showing it to papa."

No one appears to hear this indiscreet remark except Dodo, who laughs somewhat rudely.

"I was trying to remember the hymn of Faber's 'Longing for God,'" says Lady Waverley, who is never known to be at a loss. "The last verse escapes me. Can any one recall it? It is so lamentable that sectarianism prevents those hymns from being used in Protestant churches."

But no one there present is religious enough or poetic enough to help her to the missing lines.

"There is so little religious feeling anywhere in England," she remarks, with a sigh.

"It's the confounded levelling that destroys it," says Usk, echoing the sigh.

"They speak of Faber," says Madame Sabaroff. "The most beautiful and touching of all his verses are those which express the universal sorrow of the world."

And in her low, grave, melodious voice she repeats a few of the lines of the poem:

She is addressing Brandolin as she recites them; they are a little behind the others.

He does not reply, but looks at her with an expression in his eyes which astonishes and troubles her. He is thinking, as the music of her tones stirs his innermost soul, that he can believe no evil of her, will believe none,—no, though the very angels of heaven were to cry out against her.