The weeks passed on, and Othmar returned no more to the fields of Chevreuse. The great interests and the vast operations of his house occupied his time, and the days of this man whom Nature had created a dreamer and a student, went away in the consideration of financial enterprises, in the audience of innumerable supplicants, in the emission of national loans, and in the study of political situations. He thought oftentimes of her, but he went to her no more. To let her alone he knew was, as Rosselin said, all that he could do for her.

His wife he scarcely saw at this season.

Now and then when it was unavoidable he went with her to some great dinner or reception; oftener they received at home themselves, and on such evenings he saw her in all the grace and elegance which the highest culture and the utmost fashion can lend to a woman already patrician in every fibre of her being. Sometimes she addressed a few words to him concerning the children, or the horses, or some matter of mutual interest; and he saw her carriage passing in and out, her friends and acquaintances coming and going on the stairs, her attendants carrying her chocolate, or her bouquets, or the offerings made her by her courtiers: that was all. In no year had she been more absorbingly mondaine; in no year had she been so conspicuous as the greatest lady in Paris; in no year had her balls, her fÊtes, her banquets, her concerts, been more wonderful in their novelty and more exclusive in their invitations.

'Dame! elle a un chic incroyable!' thought Blanchette, angrily, watching her and conscious that her day was not done as she had hoped.

Meantime, in the brilliant movement of which his house was the centre, Othmar felt that he was becoming rapidly a mere cypher amidst it all, as Platon Napraxine had been, and he perceived no way by which he could recover his influence without her ridicule and the world's comment. That had come to him which he had said should never come: he was nothing in her life, not so much as one of her mere acquaintances.

Such a position had always seemed to him the deepest humiliation that any man could accept; he had always thought that any man might save his dignity if he could not secure his own happiness; but now, he saw how easy it is to theorise, how difficult it is to resist the slow insidious influence of circumstances. We drift into positions which we hate without being conscious of our descent, and the effect of others upon our nature and our actions is as subtle and as unperceived as those of climate or of time.

He could not have said when the first coldness had come between himself and her, when the first irritation had crept into their intercourse, when the first frost of indifference had passed from her manner over the warmth of his own emotions. It had been unperceived, uncounted, but its results had grown and strengthened, until now they were like ten thousand other men and women in the world, living under the same roof, but wholly strangers to each other, only united by one slender thread, their mutual interests. It was a position which wounded him, humiliated him, oppressed him with a constant sense of weakness and of failure: he had not the slightest power over her, though she retained much over him; strong men, he thought, either left their wives or forced them to keep their marriage vows; and he did neither.

Of late she had become almost insolent in her tone to him; she seemed to take pleasure in passing the most marked slights upon him; she purposely withheld from him the slightest acquaintance with her movements or intentions, and at times her eyes looked at him with a cynical disdain.

It was absurd, he felt, and exaggerated, and probably wholly ungrounded in every way, but there were moments when he imagined that she wished to remind him of his social inferiority to herself, moments when the recollection of the origin of the Othmar fortunes spoilt for a passing hour her pleasure in the existence of her children. Though he did not harbour the suspicion, but threw it away from him as unworthy of both himself and her, it yet existed and made him over-sensitive to any slight upon her part, quick to perceive the faintest tinge of contempt in her tone to him. He knew that she could count her great ancestries far beyond the dim days of Rurick; whilst there were courts of Europe where feudal etiquette still prevailed strongly enough to make his presence in their throne-rooms impossible. These were mere nominal differences, no doubt, and he might perchance have saved from bankruptcy the very state in which he would have been forbidden to pass the palace gates if he had sought to accompany her through them; but still there were moments when the voice and the glance of his wife recalled these conventional things to him out of the limbo of absolute nullity in which, but for those, he let them lie. Never by any spoken word or hint had she ever reminded him of them, yet now and then in her colder moments he thought: 'Perhaps she remembers that two hundred years ago if her forefathers rode over the plains of Croatia they could ride down mine before them, and drive them with their whips like so many acorn-eating swine!'

He began to believe that she was in truth as cruel as the world had always called her; and a feeling which was almost hatred at times awoke in him and blent with the suffering she caused him.

It seemed to him that no man on earth ever gave a woman such passion and such worship as he had given her; these might at least, he thought, have secured respect from her, even if they had failed to hold her sympathy.

He said nothing to her. Remonstrance would have been useless, supplication unmanly. He let time drift them where it would: and in the ever-exercising burden of his pain Damaris became almost forgotten.

Some weeks after the performance of Lemberg's cantata, Blanche de Laon, calling on the woman whom she hated on her 'jour,' came late, stayed until the rooms were nearly emptied of their crowd, and then sank down beside her hostess on a low couch in a corner palm-shadowed, where banks of lilies of the valley gave out their fragrance under rose-shaded lamps, and great Japanese vases were filled with the rosy flowers of the gesneria and the philesia. She always paid great outward deference to NadÈge, was coaxing and cÂline, and for her alone subdued the rudeness and the shrillness of her voice and manner. She leaned now beside her on the broad low seat of the cushioned corner, whilst the few people who remained in the rooms conversed in little groups, and the flowers, the porcelains, the stuffs, the pictures, the embroidered satins of the walls, the long vista of salons opening one out of another, made up one of those pictures of harmonised colour and of artistically arranged luxuries of which the modern world is so full. Blanchette had all manner of confidential things to disclose, secrets of this toilette and that, of this scandal and the other, of the true reason of a dear friend's sudden indisposition, and the actual cause of a coming duel; all these secrets de Polichinelle, which society loves to carry about and distribute, things which are mysteries of life and death yet whispered at every 'petit quart d'heure' in every house known to fashion.

Nadine listened, leaning back amongst her cushions indifferent, scarcely affecting attention, thinking of her own costume at a coming ball she was about to give, in which the rÈgne animal of Cuvier was to furnish the dresses. She had chosen a panther. All the yellow and black would make her delicate colourless skin look so well, and she would wear all her diamonds, and ——. She was aroused from her meditation by the question which Blanche de Laon put suddenly to her.

'Do tell me,' she said, leaning down amongst her cushions: 'You know I like to be the first to hear things—when will the new genius make her dÉbut with you?'

'What do you mean?'

'Oh, you know what I mean; this young artist whom Rosselin is training, in whom your husband is interested, and who is to make her first appearance here? Who is she? Do tell me about her. I should like to have her appear at my house if you have no proprietary rights to her exclusive production.'

'I have no idea of what person you speak of; I am not fond of untried artists,' she answered, with perfect indifference, but Blanchette saw a shade of surprise and a coldness of displeasure on her face.

'Oh, surely you like a dÉbutante?' she said carelessly. 'It always amuses people so much, something quite new, and I believe this girl is beautiful; does not Othmar say so?'

But by this time her hostess was on her guard, and her expression wholly under control.

'I think I know whom you mean now,' she replied indifferently. 'But as to a dÉbut here—that is quite in the future. I am not fond of untried artists as I say: one does not take out unbroken horses to drive in a crowd. Genius is admirable, but I think like wine it wants time and a seal set upon it before one offers it at one's table.'

Blanche de Laon was perplexed.

'Does she know all about her, or nothing about her?' she wondered. 'I want to know more myself before I go on with it.'

Some other people approached them at that moment; the conversation turned on the rÈgne animal ball; Blanchette, disappointed, rose and went and drank deux doigts de liqueur, and ate a caviare biscuit, in another room, where Loris Loswa was drawing some caricatures of mutual acquaintances, as the beasts of Cuvier, on his visiting cards, and distributing them amongst some ladies of fashion.

'Meet me on Saturday at eleven at the Rond point,' she murmured to him as she took from him a sketch of her brother-in-law the Duc d'YprÈs as a wild boar in top boots, over which she condescended to shriek her shrillest laughter and approval.

When her rooms were all quite emptied, and she was left alone in them, Nadine remained leaning back amongst the cushions motionless and with a cold contemptuous anger on her face.

'To think that I should accept such a part as that!' she thought. 'He must be mad and the whole world with him!'

Weak women, indulgent women, women who were afraid and wanted pardon for their own secrets, these women did these things, aided their husbands' amours, received their husbands' favourites, helped their husbands to conventional disguises of equivocal situations, but that rÔle, was not hers.

'And he came from this girl to me in Russia;' she thought with that physical disgust which is so strong in some women, and which men never understand.

One forenoon on entering his study, Othmar missed from the wall the sketch made by Loswa. There was only a blank space between the places of the Corot and the Aivanoffsky. He rang for the major-domo.

'Who has taken the portrait from that place?' he asked; he feared the entrance of some thief from the gardens.

The major-domo, astonished and alarmed, replied that he had taken it down that morning by command of his mistress, and had sent it whither she had directed him to do; to a certain gallery recently built on the TrocadÉro.

'You were quite right to do so if Madame desired you,' said Othmar; and dismissed the official without more comment.

As soon as he could be admitted to his wife's presence, he went to her and opened the subject with scanty preface.

'Philippe says that you ordered him to send the sketch by Loswa out of my study to the new gallery on the TrocadÉro,' he said, when he had made her his usual greeting. 'Is that true?'

'Very true. One would think I had ordered him to blow up the Louvre or the Luxembourg!'

'May I venture to inquire your reasons?'

'Certainly. There is an exhibition of Loswa's works about to be opened there. You are aware that these exhibitions of a single master are very popular now. That head is one of the best things he has done. It will come back to you in three months. Cannot you live without it till then?'

Othmar felt that he coloured like a boy.

'I would, of course, have lent it,' he said with a little hesitation.

'I have sent all his portraits of myself and of the children,' she said with a cold glance at him. 'You do not appear to have missed those.'

'I have probably not entered the rooms in which they hung. If you will pardon my saying so, I do not care to know less of what you wish to do than my servants know—and to know it first through them.'

'If I had told you, you would have objected. When I know that people will object, I never ask them what they wish.'

'The method has the merit of simplicity.'

He felt exceedingly angered; in the first place he did not care to have the portrait seen by all Paris at a moment when the original was living so near Paris with no friend but himself, and in the second place he indignantly resented being treated like a cypher in his own houses; he never permitted himself to intrude on her personal arrangements—could she not respect his?

Now and then, and above all of late, there had been something high-handed and even insolent in her occasional treatment of things which concerned him, and on which she did not consult him; something which made him fancy that in the deepest depth of the thoughts and feelings there was occasionally the remembrance that the great race of princes from whom she herself descended would have deemed her alliance with one of the princes of finance a gross mÉsalliance.

This was a trifle, no doubt, and he was not a man who ever disputed small matters. But the tone with which she had spoken had given it something of personal offence, and he could not shake from him the impression that she had purposely sent away the portrait. The exhibition was about to take place, no doubt, at the new gallery on the TrocadÉro; Loswa having quarrelled violently with the committee of the Salon, had chosen to prove that the collection of his works would be more attractive to the public than anything which the Salon could offer without his assistance; but the manner in which this sketch had been removed from his study, conveyed to Othmar the impression of some personal motive, some personal meaning in the act.

Capricious as his wife always was, she yet was usually courteous. This insolence of the removal of his picture was unlike her.

She always held the very true creed that mutual politeness is the first of obligations to render the intimacy of daily life endurable.

He left her presence quickly, afraid of what his anger might bring him into saying. He had never as yet wholly lost his temper with her, though there were times when it was sorely tried.

Her cold, nonchalant, slighting tone was that which always tried it the most. Of all things which he most hated it was to be spoken to as Platon Napraxine had been; like the last of her lacqueys! as he thought bitterly now. She looked after him with some scorn.

'Is he gone to the TrocadÉro to seize back his lost treasure?'

She had sent the sketch thither on purpose to see what he would do or say.

With an impulse which was as swift as thought itself and which he did not pause to consider, he turned back as he reached the threshold of her boudoir, and stood before her.

'NadÈge,' he began with an impetuosity which yet had a certain timidity in it. 'There is something which I wished to tell you the other day. There is a reason which makes me especially regret that you should have sent that portrait for exhibition without referring the matter to me. Are you inclined to be patient enough to hear a little tale which might interest you perhaps if it were a sketch by Ludovic HalÉvy, but I fear will not do so told in my poor words?'

He did not observe the expression of her eyes, which surveyed him with a cynical coldness, as she asked:

'Do you mean that you have written a romance?—or played one?'

There was the mockery in the words which he had dreaded so much that he had put off this moment day after day, week after week, month after month.

'Neither,' he answered, curtly. 'I have not talent for the one, nor time and inclination for the other. You may believe me,' he added a little bitterly, 'if I had been foolish enough to tempt fate with either, your indulgence is the last mercy for which I should hope.'

Her eyes still looked at him coldly, steadfastly; with no revelation in her gaze of whether she were surprised, interested, indifferent, or already wearied.

She was leaning back in her long low chair; there was a great deal of lace ruffled at her bosom and on her arms; she wore a long loose satin gown of palest rose effeuillÉe of which the lights and shadows were very beautiful: her hands were tightly clasped upon her lap; her great pearls gleamed behind the lace; she looked like a woman of the time of the Stuarts or of the Valois. At her elbow stood an immense bowl of Louise de Savoy roses; as she looked at him she drew out one and put it in her bosom. She did not speak or attempt to aid him in any way to continue the conversation which he had begun. She only waited, and as he saw her in that impassible attitude, his task grew harder to him; that sudden sense of her cruelty, of her want of sympathy, of her immovable indifference, which had come to him so sharply on the night of her return from Russia, struck him once more and hardened in him almost to dislike.

Why should he tell her anything? She cared nothing for what he did or what he felt. She dwelt in that serene rarefied atmosphere of her own in which no passions or pains of his could disturb her. If she had once seemed to him to lean from it for a little while to share his emotions, that time was passed, long passed, never to return again.

She was silent many minutes, but she asked no question, threw out no conjecture, did not even by a glance assist him to begin his offered narrative. If she would only have said something—anything—it would have broken the ice at least. But the marble bust of herself which stood near her, carved by Hildebrand, was not more mute than she; and she was quite motionless, her hands clasped on another rose with which she toyed.

He was angered with himself to feel that his cheeks grew warm, and that his voice was nervous as he said at last:

'I regret that the portrait is gone to the TrocadÉro, because the original of it is living near Paris, and it may lead to comment and conjecture which may be injurious to her; she is scarcely more than a child, and she will be an artist; she is better without the attention of the public until she challenges it directly.'

He did not notice a gleam like that of such which flashed over him one instant from the unrevealing eyes of his wife; the next moment the eyes of the bust were not colder and more impenetrable than hers.

'I have long meant to tell you,' he continued with rapidity, his words now coming with eagerness and eloquence from his lips. 'But I have been afraid of your ridicule. Long ago, in the midsummer of last year, I found the child of Bonaventure dying in the streets. It was at the time my uncle was on his death-bed. I did all I could for her, of course. She was long ill; when she recovered I placed her in the country with good simple people whom I knew. She is there now. Rosselin, the great actor whose name you will remember, though his career was over before your time or mine, has trained her these many months past; he believes she has great talents; that she has a future; that when you predicted the career of DesclÉe for her you showed your usual insight. She has had little but sorrow since that day you tempted her from her island; it has always seemed to me that we owed her a great debt, that we had done her a great brutality; but for us her life would have gone on in peace and prosperity, she would never have left her little kingdom; if you realised what you did that day you would regret your caprice. There are many more details I could tell you if you cared to hear them, but I know your intolerance of any demand upon your patience.'

She smiled slightly; the smile was very chill; it checked the expansion and the confidence of his words.

'You are pleased to ridicule my knight-errantry, no doubt,' he said, with heightened colour in his face. 'But no man living would have done less than I did, I think, being conscious as I was that the invitation which you gave her without thought was the origin of all her unmerited misfortune. I believe you were right that she has genius or something very nearly approaching genius, in her; and it may be that the world will in time compensate to her for all she has lost. But meantime——'

'You do so!'

The words were very calm and cold, but they struck Othmar like the cut of a whip. They cast on his words the dishonour of disbelief.

He strove to command his temper as he replied: 'I do not; no one can; she lost what no one ever can give back to her, when you showed her what the world was like, and taught her discontent. But for you, and that one evening in your house, she would have lived, and married, and spent all the even tenour of her days in her native air, on her native soil, as ignorant of ambition as any of the sea-birds on her coast.'

She looked at him with an expression of fatigue, and of exhausted patience; he saw that she was perfectly incredulous, that his words might as well have remained unspoken for any impression of their truthfulness which they conveyed to her.

'Is this all your story?' she asked.

'It is the outline of it all,' he answered. 'If you care to know more of the causes which drove her from her home——'

'They do not interest me in the least.'

Her voice was as chill as frost.

'Then allow me to apologise for having intruded even so much as this on your attention.'

He bowed before her, and was about to leave the room; but she, without rising a hair's breadth from the languid attitude in which she reclined, said, 'Wait.'

He waited, in sanguine expectation of an impulse of sympathy in which those more generous instincts, those kinder emotions which sometimes swayed her, would be aroused on behalf of a life she had thoughtlessly injured.

Still without rising she stretched out her arm, and took up a blotting-book from her writing-cabinet, which stood near. In the blotting-case was a tiny note-book of ivory and silver; she opened it, and read from it in a serene voice certain dates.

'Before you give your idyl to HalÉvy—or to the journalists in general—let me renew your memory with these memoranda,' she said in the same soft cold voice. 'Your narrative, as you tell it, is bald and wanting, as you admit, in detail. I will supply some of those details. On June 10 you brought Damaris BÉrarde to this house, where she remained ill for many days, even weeks. On July 20 you went yourself to visit her cousin, the present proprietor of the island of Bonaventure, and endeavoured to negotiate through bankers of Aix the purchase of the island, which, however, the owner refused to sell. On August 2 you had her taken, accompanied by her gardes-malades, to the farm of the Croix Blanche, which lies between the villages of Les Hameaux and Magny. On August 15 you visited Les Hameaux. In the last week of July, many objects of artistic interest and value had been already sent by you to the farmhouse. In the same week, rentes to the amount of a hundred thousand francs, were purchased on the Bourse in the name of Damaris BÉrarde. There are many more dates than these in my note-book, but those are enough to supply the lacunÆ in your story. On peut broder dessus without any great imagination. A knowledge of human nature will suffice. You will do me the favour never to re-open the subject; and as a matter of good taste, to endeavour that your idyl shall not be too largely talked about for the amusement of the world in general.'

Then she slid the little note-book within the leaves of blotting-paper, and fastened the rose in the lace at her breast.

It was impossible for him to misunderstand her meaning.

A violent anger eclipsed for the moment all sense of astonishment at her knowledge, or of wonder as to how she had acquired it. All he was conscious of was the indignity, the insult, put upon him by her utter disbelief.

He felt it a task almost beyond his strength to forbear from some such words as men must never say to women, and in the bewilderment of his emotions he was silent.

'You have engaged an actor, once great, to give her lessons in elocution,' she continued, in the same unmoved harmonious tones. 'It is the fashion of the day to have a mistress on the stage. I suppose I cannot blame you for that. As it was I who first suggested the future possibility of a dramatic success for your protÉgÉe, it is, perhaps, natural that you should have remembered my suggestions, when you sought the cover of some artistic career for her. Someone has told me that you reserve for me the part of MÆcena to her Roscia (can one feminise the names?), that you intend to have her talents first essayed and pronounced on under my roof; that the world is to be invited to smile at my credulity, or at my good nature, with whichever it may most prefer to accredit me. Women often do such things as this, I know, because they are weak, or because they need indulgence in return. But it is not a rÔle which will suit either my temper or my taste. I see the convenience to yourself of your project, but you must pardon me if I do not accept the part you would assign me in it. The world and Mlle. BÉrarde will have opportunities for mutual acquaintance and admiration without their first meeting each other in my drawing-rooms. I should not have mentioned the matter unless you had done so first, but I should have prevented the execution of your and of M. Rosselin's intentions!'

She looked at him from under her drooped eyelids, with that critical observation which never deserted her in the most trying hour, or before the deepest emotion. She did not hurry him or dismiss him, only he knew by the look upon her face, that the discussion was, in her view of it, closed irrevocably. But for the sake of the other who was involved in her judgment, he put aside his pride, his offence, and his dignity, and stooped to an appeal.

'I do not know,' he said, and he was sensible that his voice vibrated with fury, as well as with emotion, 'I do not know what steps you may have taken to enable you to tabulate my actions so exactly. I keep no diary, but I have no doubt your facts are correct. But as you put the data which have been given you by some creature you have stooped to employ, they would certainly seem to point to some selfish intrigue on my part, some vulgar use for my own ends of this young girl's illness and misfortunes. It may be even quite natural that you should take such a view of it as this, though it shows that you do not, after all, much understand my character. But I will admit that your suspicions may seem to you just. I will admit that my own reticence has been blameable and unwise, and I do not suppose you will believe how much your own habit of ridicule, of irony, and of cruel scorn, has made me shrink from provoking your malicious comments by any confidences which would seem to you sentimental and melodramatic.'

He paused, hoping for some word from her. But she spoke none. She continued to listen and to wait, in unbroken silence and serenity, her fingers touching the rose at her breast. A momentary sense of rage passed quivering over him. He understood how men may in some moments kill the woman they have loved best.

He restrained his passion with great effort, and tried to keep his words within the compass of ordinary courtesy.

'You do not know, and if you knew you would not care for it, how many a time this story, like many another thought and memory of mine, has been upon my lips, and speech has been stopped in me, merely because I was conscious you would laugh. I am a fool in your eyes, worthy to die with Rolla, to fall with Desgrieux, or any other absurd sentimentalist. I dare say you will even despise me the more if you be compelled to believe that, though I might be the lover of Damaris BÉrarde, I am not so, whatever your spies may have told you.'

Her face flushed haughtily.

'Spies! I set no watcher on your actions until you deceived me. When I know that I am deceived I have no mercy. Those who deceive me are outside my pale. I hunt them down. Foolish women can bear to be blinded. I am not foolish, and I do not consent to be so.'

'I have never deceived you.'

She gave a gesture of deprecation, slight but full of unuttered disdain.

'Long ago I told you that if you had strength enough in you to tell me when you were weak, I should not be like other women; I should understand: to understand is always to forgive; a greater woman than I am has said it. If you had come to me frankly, with no subterfuge, no pretext, no empty phrases of untrue sentiments, but had said honestly that you were no better than other men, I should have told you that follies of that sort need never disturb our friendship nor our confidence, but——'

'But, my God, what had I to confess?' cried Othmar, with that passionate protest of the tortured man who calls in vain that he is innocent.

Infinite contempt swept over her face. What a fool he seemed to her! What a poor, weak coward and fool!

'If there were any lover whom I loved, how I should hurl the truth of it in his face!' she thought. 'Men are such cowards—so half-hearted and so tame, and never hardly even knowing what they do love! If he would only be truthful even now, what should I care!—a wretched child off the streets, a creature who owes her very bread to him—what rival could she be to me!'

She felt for him all the superb disdain that Cleopatra might have felt had she known that Anthony toyed with a slave from the market-place, and dared not plead guilty to his paltry sin.

He heard her with indignant and bewildered amaze. There is a great simplicity in every honest man, and he, despite his knowledge of the world, was single-minded as a boy. That she should refuse to believe him when he told the truth seemed to him incredible.

'Can you insinuate that I would speak such a lie—I?' he cried to her in violent emotion.

She answered coldly:

'Oh, yes: those untruths are always counted as men's honour.'

'They are not mine; nor my dishonour either. I never willingly spoke an untruth yet to man or woman. If this child were my mistress I would tell you so. You may remember that many a time you have bade me take my liberty. You would care nothing if I did so. Why should I have concealed what you would not have done me the honour to resent?'

He paused, expecting her to say some word of assent or dissent, but she remained silent.

'Certainly,' he said, bitterly, 'had I considered myself free in all ways I should have been justified in doing so. Few men of your world see less of you than I. Your very lacqueys know more of your engagements and your intentions than I do. You lend great brilliancy to my name, you give great distinction to my houses, you allow my children to sit by you in your carriage, and you permit me to receive kings for you in your antechambers. But more than that you deny me. If I sought elsewhere the tenderness I seek in vain from you, could you complain of my infidelity?'

'I do not complain of the infidelity; it is immaterial; I complain of the long series of elaborate deceptions with which you have endeavoured, with which you still endeavour, to surround it.'

'I repeat, there has been no deception.'

She laughed, laughed slightly that cruel laugh of a woman, which can tell a man with impunity what a man could never dare to tell him—that he has lied.

'You dare to doubt me still!' he exclaimed, with that blindness and good faith with which a man, candid and honest himself, expects credence from others; he had never in his heart really doubted that when he should tell the truth to her she would believe it.

Conscious rectitude has a curious pathetic ignorance of its own impotence to move others; it imagines that it has but to speak and mountains will fall before it.

Because this thing was clear as daylight to his own knowledge, to his own conscience, he stupidly thought that it must stand out plain as the noonday to her likewise. Those who tell the truth always fancy that the truth must be like those trumpets before which the walls of Jericho fell.

'You dare to doubt my word!' he cried again passionately; she looked him full in the face coldly and calmly.

'Told earlier,' she said in her serenest voice, 'your comedy might have deceived even me. Told now, I do not think it would deceive the most credulous woman living—and I am not credulous. I am like Montaigne; I do not accept miracles out of church.'

His face grew white and grey with wounded pride and breathless passion as he heard her. The same sense of hopelessness which had come over so many of her lovers when driven to appeal to a mercy which had no existence in her, came over him now. He felt that one might throw one's self for ever against the smooth white marble of her soul, and never gain from it either pity or belief.

His patience was at an end, and his bitter sense of wrong, done to himself and to one absent, broke down all his self-control.

'But as God lives you shall believe!' he cried to her. 'You shall believe it for her sake, not for mine nor yours. You can cover the whole world with the fine scorn of your scepticism if you will, but you shall believe this. I may have done unwisely what I have done for her. I may have acted with that mule-like stupidity which you consider the characteristic of men. I may even, God forgive me, have not done what was best for the child herself; but in all that I have done, I have been honest in it, and not a mere lecherous egotist. You have never deigned to try and measure the feeling with which I have regarded you, but you ought, I think, to understand enough of the common honour which I share with all men who are not scoundrels, to believe in my word when I give it you. The woman with whom she lives at Les Hameaux is of good repute and blameless conduct. Rosselin, who has become her teacher, is a man too upright to accord his assistance in any common intrigue. The money I placed to her credit she imagines to be a legacy of her grandfather, whose heiress she would have been if you in a moment of unaccountable and unconsidered caprice had not tempted her to incur the old man's anger. All these things are capable of the simplest explanations. Still, I will concede that, without explanation, they may have appeared singular and suspicious to you. But, however much they may do so, I expect from you that acceptance of my bare word, that belief in my common honour, which the merest stranger to me on earth would not dare to refuse.'

She preserved her perfect composure, the rose in her breast was not ruffled by one uneven breath; she looked at him with cold, calm, unkind eyes, which never wavered in their rejection of him.

'You are melodramatic,' she said, with her serene contempt. 'Perhaps you will appear on the stage, too! I shall be glad if you will spare me more words on such a subject. I shall not resent it publicly. All I request of you is to avoid publicity in it as far as possible. That is a mere matter of good taste.'

'Good God!' he cried, beside himself. 'Do you credit that I should stand here and lie to you? Do you believe that I should stoop so low?—do you think that I come here like a comedian to repeat a monologue of my own invention? You may think what else of me that you will, but this you shall not think. I am not the lover of Damaris BÉrarde; I have never been so—I shall never be so.'

'If you swore it on the lives of your own children, I would not believe you?'

Some reflex and heat of the flame of his rage caught her soul also for one sudden instant, and drew it out for that one instant from its serenity and reticence.

There was the vibration of intensest passion in her voice; she half rose from her seat; her bosom heaved; the rose fell in a shower of leaves to the floor; for the moment he thought that she would strike him.

'You shall believe me,' he said in answer, 'or I will not live under the same roof with you!'

Then he looked at her with one last look, and left her presence.