Othmar went into his great library, and shut the door upon himself. For more than an hour he paced to and fro the length of the room, overcome with an agitation which he could not master. He had a sense that his life was over. He felt as though his very heart-strings had snapped and parted for ever. A great love cannot perish without some such throb as a strong animal life suffers when it is forcibly torn asunder. A kind of horror seized him at the idea of the years which were to come; the long, long years through which he would dwell in apparent amity beside her in the sight of the world.

His first impulse was to go out of the house, out of the city, out of the world, to leave her everything he possessed, but never to see her face again.

But a brief reflection made him feel how impossible such a course as that would be to him. Obscure people can do these things, they are happy; they are not set in the fierce light of publicity and society, and no one heeds it if they creep away to lay their aching heads under some lowly roof in solitude. But to a man well known and conspicuous in the life of the world, any such retreat into obscurity is impossible. He is bound hand and foot by a million threads, each strong as cables to hold him to his place. He cannot forsake his place without forsaking a mass of interests confided to his honour. Solitude is for ever forbidden to him, and liberty he can never more recover. Life never gives two opposite sets of gifts to the same recipient; it never bestows both the king's dominion and the peasant's peace. The sigh of Henry IV. upon his sleepless couch is the sigh of all eminence whatever be its throne.

Othmar's momentary longing to go far away from everything and everyone he had ever known, and never again behold the woman whom he had adored, and who had insulted him as though she had struck him with a knout, was the natural thirst for loneliness of all wounded creatures. But he knew that this desire, like so many others, was hopeless; he could never leave her or the world he lived in; there were his children, who must not be sacrificed, and the fortunes of others which must not be imperilled. He knew that he could no more undo the bands fastened—many by his own hand—around him, than he could sweep ten years off the sum of his past life. Such as his existence was now, so he had to continue it.

He walked to and fro the vast length of the chamber in the quiet of the noonday. He felt as if her hand had struck him.

It had not been even an insult of unpremeditated passion, of hot anger, of inconsiderate haste—as such as he might have pardoned it—but, serene and deliberate and measured, spoken in cold blood, and matured on long consideration, it had been such an outrage as severs the closest ties, and destroys the most profound affections, cuts at the deepest roots of self-respect, and burns up all delicate fibres of sympathy. He would much sooner have forgiven a dagger's thrust.

He had been insulted by the one person for whom he had given up all his life, all his loyalty, all his devotion, all his faith, and all his years to come. The outrage of her insolence, of her disbelief, burned in his heart as the shame of a blow burns on a brave man's forehead. Never could he make her believe, though he were to swear the truth to her as he lay dying!

That perfect silence with which she had listened and led him on to speak, that perfect consciousness of all his actions which had existed beneath her apparent ignorance, that feline attitude of cold expectation and of watchful, motionless observation with which she had waited for the telling of a tale of which she already knew every smallest detail: all these seemed to him horrible, hateful, unnatural in a woman so near to him, so dear to him, to whom he had given up his life, and whom he had never wronged, or slighted, or betrayed. And then the espionage!—all his soul revolted at it.

'One might have known that the weapon of a Russian woman is always a spy!' he thought, with passionate indignation at what seemed to him this last and lowest of affronts.

If he had found in her any of the warm and fond, though unwise, angers of that jealousy which loves whilst it hates, he would have forgiven and comprehended it. But he could not hope that there was any single pulse of it in her breast. She had viewed and measured his actions with the accuracy and coldness of a judge of court overwhelming any prisoner with his logic, and had treated his own asseverations with utter and contemptuous disbelief, not deigning even to weigh as remotely possible the chance that he might tell the truth. He himself would have taken her word against that of the whole world, against all evidence of his own senses, all adverse witness of circumstance.

'I was mad to suppose she ever cared for me,' he thought bitterly, whilst the tears rose hotly in his eyes. 'For my children she cares, perhaps, but for me nothing: I have never been wise enough, great enough, strong enough to compel even her respect. She looks on me as a mere dreamer, a mere fool. All she is anxious for now is that the world may not have a story to laugh at, because it would lessen her dignity and offend her pride!'

And yet he loved her still as he remembered her there sitting so still, so fair, with the cold challenge in her eyes, and the pale roses at her breast; and she was all his, and yet as far off him as though she were queen in another world beyond the sun; and he loved her still, and was filled with guilty shame at his own weakness, as men are when they still adore the women who have defiled their name.