"The Babe is a better courtier than gardener," says Xenia Sabaroff, as she shakes a green aphis out of her rose: her tone is careless, but her voice is not quite under her command, and has a little tremor in it.

Brandolin looks at her with impassioned eyes: he has grown very pale.

"It is no jest with me," he says, under his breath. "I would give you my life if you would take it?"

The last words have the accent of an interrogation, of an appeal.

"That is to say a great deal," replies Xenia Sabaroff: she is startled, astonished, troubled; she was not expecting any such entire avowal.

"Many men must have said as much to you who have more to recommend them than I. Say something to me: what will you say?"

She does not immediately reply; she looks on the ground, and absently traces patterns on the path with the end of her long walking-stick.

"Do you know," she says, at last, after a silence which seems to him endless, "do you know that there are people who believe that I have been the dÉlaissÉe of Lord Gervase? They do not phrase it so roughly, but that is what they say."

Brandolin's very lips are white, but his voice does not falter for one moment as he answers, "They will not say it in my hearing."

"And, knowing that they say it, you would still offer me your name?"

"I do so."

"And you would ask me nothing save what I choose to tell you?"

The sunny air seems to turn round with him for an instant: his brain grows dizzy; his heart contracts with a sickening pain; but in the next moment a great wave of strong and perfect faith in the woman he cares for lifts his soul up on it, as a sea-wave lifts a drowning man to land.

"You shall tell me nothing save what you choose," he says, clearly and very tenderly. "I have perfect faith in you. Had I less than that, I would not ask you to be my wife."

She looks at him with astonishment and with wondering admiration.

"Yet you know so little of me!" she murmurs, in amaze.

"I love you," says Brandolin; then he kisses her hand with great reverence.

The tears which she had thought driven from her eyes forever, rise in them now.

"You are very noble," she replies, and leaves her hand for an instant within his.

The Babe, who has been watching from behind a tuft of laurel, can control his impatience no longer, but comes out of his ambush and runs towards them, regardless of how undesired he may be.

"Dodo says that women never marry anybody they love," he says, breathlessly; "but that is not true, is it, and you will let me carry your train?"

"Hush, my dear," says Xenia Sabaroff, laying her hand on the child's shoulder, while there is a sound in her voice which subdues to silence even the audacious spirit of the Babe.

"Give me time to think," she says, in a low tone to Brandolin; and then, with her hand still on the little boy's shoulder, she turns away from him and walks slowly towards the house.

The child walks silently and shyly beside her, his happy vanity troubled for once by the sense that he has made some mistake, and that there are some few things still in the universe which he does not quite entirely understand.

"You are not angry?" he asks her, at last, with a vague terror in his gay and impudent little soul.

"Angry with you?" says Xenia Sabaroff. "My dear child, no. I am perhaps angry with myself,—myself of many years ago."

The Babe is silent: he does not venture to ask any more, and he has a humiliating feeling that he is not first in the thoughts of Madame Sabaroff,—nay, that, though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon his shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten him.

Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her great charm for him consists in the power she possesses of compelling him to control his impulses. He walks away by himself through the green shadows of the boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. He is fully aware that he has done a rash, perhaps an utterly unwise, thing in putting his future into the hands of a woman of whom he knows so little, and has, perhaps, the right to suspect so much. Yet he does not repent.

He does not see her again before dinner. She does not come into the library at the tea-hour; there is a large dinner that night; county people are there, as well as the house-party. He has to take in a stupid woman, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, who thinks him the most absent-minded and unpleasant person she has ever known, and wonders how he has got his reputation as a wit. He is so seated that he cannot even see Xenia Sabaroff, and he chafes and frets throughout the dinner, from the bisque soup to the caviare biscuit, and thinks what an idiotic thing the habits of society have made of human life.

When he is fairly at rare intervals goaded into speech, he utters paradoxes, and suggests views so startling that the wife of the Lord-Lieutenant is scandalized, and thinks the lunacy laws are defective if they cannot include and incarcerate him. She feels sure that the rumor about the Hindoo women at St. Hubert's Lea is entirely true.

After dinner he is free to approach the lady of his thoughts, but he endeavors in vain to tell from her face what answer he will receive, what time and meditation may have done or undone for him. She avoids the interrogation of his eyes, and is surrounded by other men as usual.

The evening seems to him intolerably long and intolerably tedious. It is, however, for others very gay. There is an improvised dance, ending in an impromptu cotillion, and following on an act of a comic opera given with admirable spirit by Lady Dawlish, Mrs. Curzon, and some of the younger men. Every one is amused, but the hours seem very slow to him: Gervase scarcely leaves her side at all, and Brandolin, with all his chivalrous refusal and unchanging resolution to allow no shadow of doubt to steal over him, feels the odious whispers he has heard and the outspoken words of Litroff recur to his memory and weigh on him like the incubus of a nightmare. With a sensation of dread, he realizes that it is possible, do what he may, that they may haunt him so all his life. A man may be always master of his acts, but scarcely always of his thoughts.

"But I will never ask her one syllable," he thinks, "and I will marry her to-morrow if she chooses."

But will she choose?

He is far from sure. He pleases her intelligence; he possesses her friendship; but whether he has the slightest power to touch her heart he does not know. If he loved her less than he does he would be more confident.

As the interminable hours wear away, and the noise and absurdities of the cotillion are at their height, she, who never dances anywhere, drops her fan, and he is before the others in restoring it to her. As she takes it, she says, in a low voice, "Be in the small library at eleven to-morrow."

Soon after she leaves the ball-room altogether, and goes to her bedchamber.

Brandolin goes to his before the cotillion is over, but he sleeps very little. He longs for the morrow, and yet he dreads it. "Quand mÊme," he murmurs, as from his bed he sees the white dawn over the dark masses of the Surrenden woods. Tell him what she may, he thinks, he will give her his life if she will take it. He is madly in love, no doubt; but there is something nobler and purer than the madness of love, than the mere violent instincts of passion, in his loyalty to her. Before anything he cherishes the honor of his name and race, and he is willing, blindfold, to trust her with it.

That morning it seems to him as if the hours would never pass, though they are few until the clocks strike eleven. The house is still, almost every one is asleep, for the cotillion, successful as only unpremeditated things ever are, had lasted till the sun was high and the dew on the grass of the garden was dry.

With a thickly-beating heart, nervous and eager as though he were a boy of sixteen seeking his first love-tryst, he enters the small library far before the hour, and waits for her there, pacing to and fro the floor. The room is full of memories of her: here they have talked on rainy days and have strolled out on to the lawns on fine ones; there is the chair which she likes best, and there the volume she had taken down yesterday; could it be only ten days since standing here he had seen her first in the distance with the children? Only ten days! It seems to him ten years, ten centuries.

The morning is very still, a fine soft rain is falling, wet jessamine-flowers tap against the panes of the closed windows, a great apprehension seems to make his very heart stand still.

As the clock points to the hour she enters the room.

She is very pale, and wears a morning gown of white plush, which trails behind her in a silver shadow. He kisses her hands passionately, but she draws them away.

"Wait a little," she says, gently. "Wait till you know—whatever there is to know."

"I want to know but one thing."

She smiles a little sadly.

"Oh, you think so now because you are in love with me. But in time to come, when that is passed, you will not be so easily content. If"—she hesitates a moment—"if there is to be any community between our lives, you must be quite satisfied as to my past. It is your right to be so satisfied; and were you not so, some time or other we should both be wretched."

His eyes flash with joy.

"Then——" he begins breathlessly.

"Oh! how like a man that is!" she says, sadly. "To think but of the one thing, of the one present moment, and to be ready to give all the future in pawn for it! Wait to hear everything. And first of all I must tell you that Lord Gervase also last night asked me to marry him."

"And you!"

"I shall not marry Lord Gervase. But I will not disguise from you that once I would have done so gladly, had I been free to do it."

Brandolin is silent: he changes color.

"I bade him come here for my answer," she continues. "He will be here in a few minutes. I wish you to remain in the large library, so that you may hear all that I say to him."

"I cannot do that. I cannot play the part of eavesdropper."

"You will play that part, or any other that I ask you, if you love me," she says, with a touch of imperiousness.

"Do you not see," she goes on, with more gentleness, "that if our lives are to be passed near each other (I do not say that they are, but you seem to wish it), you must first of all be convinced of the truth of all I tell you? If one doubt, one suspicion, remain, you will, in time, become unable to banish it. It would grow and grow until you were mastered by it. You believe in what I tell you now; but how long would you believe after marriage?"

"I want no proof: I only want your word. Nay, I do not even want that. I will ask you nothing. I swear that I will never ask you anything."

"That is very beautiful; and I am sure that you mean it now. But it could not last. You are a very proud man; you are gentilhomme de race. It would in time become intolerable to you if you believed that any one living man had any title to point a finger of scorn at you. You have a right to know what my relations were with Lord Gervase: it is necessary for all the peace of our future that you should know everything,—know that there is nothing more left for you to know. You can only be convinced of that if you yourself hear what I say to him. Go; and wait there."

Brandolin hesitates. To listen unseen is a part which seems very cowardly to him, and yet she is right, no doubt; all the peace of the future may depend on it. He is ready to pledge himself blindly in the dark in all ways, but he knows that she, in forbidding him to do so, speaks the word of wisdom, of foresight, and of truth.

"Go," she repeats. "Men have a thousand ways of proving the truth of whatever they say; we have none, or next to none. If you refuse me this, the sole poor evidence that I can produce, I will never be to you anything that you now wish. Never; that I swear to you."

He hesitates, and looks at her with a long inquiring regard. Then he bows, and goes.

After all, she is within her rights. She has no other means to show him with any proof what this man whose name is so odiously entangled with her own has, or has not, been to her.

The house is still quite silent, and no one is likely to come into those rooms until much later. Every syllable said in the small library can be heard in any part of the larger one. He stands in the embrasure of one of the windows, the velvet curtains making a screen behind him. He seems to wait for hours; in reality only five minutes have passed when he hears the door of the great library open, and Gervase passes quickly through the apartment without seeing him, and goes on into the one where she awaits his coming.

"Are you really risen so early?" she says, with a sarcastic coldness in her voice. "I remembered afterwards that it was too cruel to name to you any hour before noon."

"You are unkind," he answers. "To hear what I hope to hear, you may be sure that I would have gone through much greater trials than even rising with the lark, had you commanded it."

His words are light, but his accent is tender and appealing.

"What do you hope to hear?" she asks, abruptly. The question embarrasses him and sounds cold.

"I hope to hear that you pardon me the past and will deign to crown my future."

"I pardon you the past, certainly. With neither your present nor your future have I anything to do."

"You say that very cruelly,—so cruelly that it makes your forgiveness more unkind than your hatred would be."

"I intend no unkindness. I merely wish to express indifference. Perhaps I am even mistaken in saying that I entirely forgive you. When I remember that you once possessed any influence over me, I scarcely do forgive you, for I am forced to despise myself."

"Those are very hard words! Perhaps in the past I was unworthy of having known and loved you; but if you will believe in my regret, and allow me occasion to atone, you shall never repent of your indulgence. Pray hear me out, Xenia——"

"You cannot call me by that name. It is for my friends: you are not numbered among them."

"I would be much more than your friend. If you will be my wife."

"It is too late," she replies, and her voice is as cold as ice.

"Why too late? We have all the best of our lives unspent before us."

"When I say too late, I mean that if you had said as much to me after the death of Prince Sabaroff I should have accepted your hand, and I should have spent the whole remainder of my existence in repenting that I had done so; for I should soon have fathomed the shallowness of your character, the artificiality and poverty of your sentiments, the falseness of your mind, and I should speedily have hated both myself and you."

"You are not merciful, madame!"

He is bitterly humbled and passionately incensed.

"Were you merciful?" she asks him, with the sound of a great anger, carefully controlled, vibrating in her voice. "I was a child, taken out of a country convent, and married as ignorantly as a bird is trapped. I had rank, and I was burdened by it. I was in a great world, a great court, and I was terrified by them. The man I had been given to was a gambler, a drunkard, and a brute. He treated me in private as he had treated the women captured in Turkestan or sold as slaves in Persia. You knew that: you were his intimate associate. You used your opportunities to interest me and win your way into my confidence. I had no one in the whole world that I could trust. I did trust you."

She pauses a moment.

Gervase does not dare reply.

"You were so gentle, so considerate, so full of sympathy; I thought you a very angel. A girl of sixteen or seventeen sees the face of St. John in the first Faust who finds his way into her shut soul! You made me care for you; I do not deny it. But why did I care? Because I saw in you the image of a thousand things you were not. Because I imagined that my own fanciful ideal existed in you, and you had the ability to foster the illusion."

"But why recall all this?" he says, entreatingly. "Perhaps I was unworthy of your innocent attachment, of your exalted imaginations; I dare not say that I was not; but now that I meet you again, now that I care for you ten thousand—ten million times more——"

"What is that to me?" she says, with almost insolent coldness. "It was not I who loved you, but a child who knew no better, and whose heart was so bleeding from the tortures of another man that the first hand which soothed it could take it as one takes a wounded bird! But when my eyes opened to your drift and your desires, when I saw that you were no better than other men, that you tried to tempt me to the lowest forms of intrigue under cover of your friendship with my husband, then, child though I was, I saw you as you were, and I hid myself from you! You thought that Sabaroff exiled me from his jealousy of you to the northern estates; but it was not so. I entreated him to let me leave Petersburg, and he had grown tired of torturing me and let me go."

"You blame me for being merely human. I loved you not better but not worse than men do love."

"I blame you for having been insincere, treacherous, dishonest. You approached me under cover of the most delicate and forbearing sympathy and reverence, and you only wore those masks to cover the vulgar designs of a most commonplace Lothario. Of course, now I know that one must not play with fire unless one is willing to be burned. I did not know it then. I was a stupid, unhappy, trembling child, full of poetic fancies, and alone in a dissolute crowd. When you could not make me what you wished to make me, I seemed very tame and useless to you. You turned to more facile women, no doubt, and you left Russia."

"I left Russia under orders; and I wrote to you. I wrote to you repeatedly. You never answered."

"No; I had no wish to answer you. I had seen you as you were, and the veil had fallen from my eyes. I burnt your letters as they came to me. But after the death of Prince Sabaroff you were careful to write no more."

Gervase colors hotly; there is an accent in the words which makes them strike him like whips.

"If you had written to me after that," she continues, "perhaps I should have answered you; perhaps not: I cannot tell. When you knew that I was set free you were silent; you stayed away, I know not where. I never saw you again; I never heard from you again. Now I thank you for your neglect and oblivion, but at the time I confess that it made me suffer. I was very young still, and romantic. For a while I expected every month which melted the snow would bring you back. So much I admit, though it will flatter you."

It does not flatter him as she says it; rather it wounds him. He has a hateful sense of his own impotency to stir her one hand's breadth, to breathe one spark of warmth into those ashes gone cold forever.

"I do not think," she continues, "that I ever loved you in the sense that women can love; but you had the power to make me suffer, to feel your oblivion, to remember you when you had forgotten me. When I went into the world again I heard of your successes with others, and gradually I came to see you in your true light, and, almost, the drunken brutality of Prince Sabaroff seemed to me a manlier thing than your half-hearted and shallow erotics had been. Now, when we meet again by pure hazard in the same country house, you do me the honor to offer me your hand after eight years. I can only say, as I have said before, that it is seven years too late!"

"Too late, only because Lord Brandolin now is everything to you."

"Lord Brandolin may possibly be something to me in the future. But, if Lord Brandolin did not exist, if no other living man existed, be sure that it would make no difference to me—or to you."

"Is that your last word?"

"Yes."

Pale and agitated as no other woman had ever seen him, Gervase bows low and leaves her abruptly, pushing open one of the glass doors on to the garden and closing it with a clash behind him.

Xenia Sabaroff goes towards the large library, her silvery train catching the lights and shadows as she goes.

Brandolin meets her with his hands outstretched.

"You are content, then?" she asks.

"I am more than content,—if I may be allowed to atone to you for all that you have suffered."

His own eyes are dim as he speaks.

"But you know that the world will always say that he was my lover?"

"I do not think that the world will say it—of my wife; but, if it do, I, at least, shall not be troubled."

"You have a great nature," she says, with deep emotion.

Brandolin smiles. "Oh, I cannot claim so much as that; but I have a great love."

"I'm awfully glad that prig's got spun," says George Usk, as Gervase receives a telegram from the Foreign Office which requires his departure from Surrenden at four o'clock that afternoon.

"Spun! What imagination!" says his wife, very angrily. "Who should have spun him, pray will you tell me?"

"We shall never hear it in so many words," says Usk, with a grim complacency, "but I'll swear, if I die for it, that he's asked your Russian friend to marry him and that she's said she won't. Very wise of her, too. Especially if, as you imply, they carried on together years ago: he'd be eternally throwing it in her teeth: he's what the Yanks call a 'tarnation mean cuss.'"

"I never implied anything of the sort," answers the lady of Surrenden, with great decorum and dignity. "I never suppose that all my friends are all they ought to be, whatever yours may leave to be desired. If he were attached long ago to Madame Sabaroff, it is neither your affair nor mine. It may possibly concern Lord Brandolin, if he have the intentions which you attribute to him."

"Brandolin can take care of himself," says Usk, carelessly. "He knows the time of day as well as anybody, and I don't know why you should be rough on it, my lady: it will be positively refreshing if anybody marries after one of your house-parties; they generally only get divorced after them."

"The Waverleys are very good friends still, I believe," says Dorothy Usk, coldly.

The reply seems irrelevant, but to the ear of George Usk it carries considerable relevancy.

He laughs a little nervously. "Oh, yes: so are we, aren't we?"

"Certainly," says the mistress of Surrenden.

At the first Drawing-room this year, the admired of all eyes, and the centre of all comment, is the Lady Brandolin.