When Othmar returned to Paris he paid Rosselin a visit.

'You have been to Chevreuse?' asked Rosselin. 'No?'

'No,' said Othmar with sincerity and some annoyance, 'I am still at AmyÔt. I only come to Paris occasionally. Is she well? Are you satisfied?'

'She is quite well,' replied Rosselin. 'The answer to the other question is less simple. I am satisfied with her talent, not with her character.'

'What do you mean?'

'Oh, nothing that is her fault. I merely meant that she is, as Madame la Comtesse once said, "une sensitive." Such people have no business in public careers. You do not make street-posts out of the stems of a sensitive plant. The Latins gave the statues that were destined to stand in thoroughfares brass discs to protect them. If you have not the brass disc you must not stand even in the peristyle of a theatre.'

'I do not think she is weak. Had she been weak she would not have left the island as she did.'

'Who is talking of weakness?—I mean that she is not of a temper for the coarse career of the stage, which is always passed in the press and glare of a stormy crowd. She would play Dona Sol divinely to an audience of poets on your terraces at AmyÔt under a midsummer moon. But it is unfortunately not a question of playing it so, but on the stages of public theatres, where very often the coarse applause of the friendly ignorant is still more offensive than the envenomed vituperation of the hostile critic. I dare say we can make her fit for this. We can give her the brass disc, but it will spoil the fine white marble when we fasten it to it. My dear Count Othmar, you know what the life of a great actress in Paris is; you know what it will be for her. We need not spend words on details. Is it a good action that we do when we encourage her to qualify herself for it, or is it a bad one?'

Othmar heard him with distress. He was always haunted by the memory that his wife, by a few careless words, had broken up for ever that simple, peaceful, healthful, flower-like life which Damaris BÉrarde had led in Bonaventure. The power of all the kings of the earth could not have replaced her in it.

'It is her choice,' he said, after a silence of some moments.

'Is fate ever wholly choice?' said Rosselin. 'And when a child says he will be a soldier, what does he know of war, of wounds, of the sickening stench of the rotting dead, of the maladies which kill men in hundreds like murrained cattle? Nothing: he thinks it all tambour et trompette and VÆ Victis! Your friend at Chevreuse knows no more of what the life of the theatre is than the child knows of war, and I for one have not the courage to enlighten her. Have you? She dreams of all kinds of glories; she does not see the rouge-pot, the white powder, the claque, the press, the lovers, the diamonds, the ugliness, the vulgarity, the money bags, the whole ronde du diable. She thinks she will be Dona Sol, be Esther, be Rosalind, off the stage as well as on it. Who is to tell her the mistake she makes?'

'Surely you can, if anyone?'

'No, I cannot. You cannot make a mind conceive a thing wholly inconceivable to it. I can say a certain number of words certainly to her; produce a certain effect; suggest some images to her which will be painful and revolting. But when I have done that I shall not have done much; I shall not have produced any real impression on her, because the advice which I mean will not in itself be intelligible to her. I may talk as I will of war to the child; but I shall never be able to make him see what I have seen in the days of the siege of Paris, which sometimes still turns me sick when I awake at night and think of it. Perhaps it is because I grow old, and, so, sentimental that I am troubled with those scruples which I do not suppose would have suggested themselves to me twenty, or even ten years ago; but I certainly do feel that I have not done what contents me in preparing Damaris BÉrarde for the art of the stage. She will be a great artist, I believe, but she will be a miserable woman.'

Othmar heard him with anxiety and pain. The vision of her was always before him as he had left her in the red brown grass with the evening skies behind her. Country peace, woodland silences, fresh air of early autumn, simple pleasures of youth—these would find no place in life into which she had been led to enter. Some, losing them early, long for them all their lives.

'I suppose,' continued Rosselin, 'that the imagination in me is dying out; as one grows old one drops illusions, as old trees drop branch after branch on the ground, till there is nothing left but the trunk, and perhaps a woodpecker in it, perhaps nothing except dust. Certainly twenty years ago I should have said, and should have thoroughly believed, that art—any art—was worth any sacrifice. But now I do not think so. One pays too heavily for any kind of fame. To be famous at all is to have all the doors and windows of your house standing wide open, and a mob, all eyes and ears, for ever staring in and watching you as you eat, as you drink, as you sleep, as you play, aye, even as you weep by your child's coffin or draw the shroud over the breast of your dead mistress. Once famous, you never can laugh or can cry in solitude ever again. Either to throw laurel crowns at you or to pelt you with stones, the mob is always pushing in over your threshold. When boys and girls dream of fame they do not know what it is—the eternal adieu to privacy, the eternal self-surrender to the crowd. Alkibiades loved the crowd; there are many like him in all centuries; but les sensitives hate it, shrink from it, try to bar it out with their bare arm, which gets broken in the struggle, like the Scottish maiden's in history. The price paid is too heavy. All the shade and the freshness and the quiet leafy by-paths of life are denied us for ever. There is only the great high-road, the crude hard light, the gaping multitude that stare and grin till we give up the ghost! The price is too heavy. It is the same curse as the curse which lies on kings, never to be alone.'

He sighed as he turned and walked up the little path of his cottage garden. Looking back upon his life he seemed to have thrown his years to the mob as offal is thrown to a pack of hounds.

It was only a mood, a passing mood, but there was a great truth in it.

'One needs not to be famous to suffer that curse,' said Othmar. 'Whoever is in the world has it. Private life is a thing of the past; we are all expected to dine and to sup, and to spread our bridal-beds and our death-beds, in public, like the monarchs of old. An age which has invented the electric light has abolished solitude and respects no privacy; it will end in forcing all Âmes d'Élite to find and form a new ThebaÏd.'

'If they can anywhere find a square mile without a tramway and a telephone!' said Rosselin, tenderly touching a tea-rose which blossomed in the cold wet weather against the low white wall of his house.

Then he said abruptly:

'What does your wife say now of her second DesclÉe?'

Othmar was angered to feel that the natural interrogation embarrassed him.

'My wife has forgotten both her prophecies and the subject of them,' he said with a certain impatience and bitterness in the accent with which the words were spoken.

'And you have not refreshed her memory?'

'I think it would be useless.'

Rosselin was silent: he was not pleased. He angrily thought of BÉthune, and wondered if he would speak of his encounter with Damaris.

'Some one will tell her if you do not,' he said with some significance. 'Pardon me if I say too much, but I dislike concealments; they are usually unwise and seldom profitable. Chevreuse is not a vale in Venus or Polaris, that we can be sure no one will ever see your protÉgÉe!'

'Anyone may see her,' said Othmar, with annoyance and hauteur. 'But to recall to my wife a subject she has forgotten demands a courage of which I frankly confess myself not the possessor.'

'Humph!' said Rosselin with dubious accent: he was not satisfied. It seemed to him that embarrassing complications would of necessity grow up out of so much needless reticence. Othmar, he thought, was most probably not aware himself of all the various and confused motives which disposed him to silence on the name of Damaris.

'She is not of a facile character,' he thought, recalling all he had ever heard of the caprices and cruelties of Nadine Napraxine in her youth. 'But when there is a nettle in question it is always best to grasp it boldly. Besides, if she be so indifferent as they say, the whole thing would be of infinitesimal insignificance to her, unless concealment were to lend it an importance not its own, as some shadows can be thrown on a white wall so as to make a beetle loom large as an ox.'

'Chevreuse, moreover,' continued Othmar, 'is a place that no one ever sees in winter. Unless it be in the few weeks when Dampierre is occupied, not a soul of our world ever goes there. If she mean or hope to become famous with the fame you decry, she is best there in solitude; if, on the contrary, she fail it will be still well that none should know her efforts who would not pity them. My wife is like the Latins, she has no altar to pity; she despises it. If the world ever applaud Damaris BÉrarde, then and then only shall I venture to recall to her the prophecy she made at St. Pharamond.'

'If with her nothing succeeds like success she only follows the world,' said Rosselin. 'I thought she led it?'

'She does lead it: but she has great contempt for those who fail in it. When a lamb falls from fatigue on the Australian plains the shepherd walks on and leaves it to its fate. Those who fail seem to my wife as the fallen lambs do to the shepherd: that is all.'

'Damaris BÉrarde will not fail,' said Rosselin, with a sense of anger and of triumph in her.

'AimÉe DesclÉe did not fail—but she died.'

'Damaris will not die; she is too strong; but she may break her heart over broken illusions, as a thorough-bred horse breaks his over bad roads. Good God, what a beautiful world it would be if it were like the world these youths and maidens see in their dreams!'

'She may break her heart over broken illusions.'

The words haunted Othmar's memory as he left the cottage at AsniÈres. Yes, that was often the death of the strongest, death mental and moral if not death physical.

What he had done for her had secured her future from want, had given her a safe home for so long as she would be content with it; but how much more was there for which no prescience could provide, from which no friendship could secure her! With her ardent temperament, her ignorance of life, her poetic and unwise impulses, how much would her heart ask and her imagination demand! She would not, could not, lead the passionless life of passionless natures. Whom would she love? Would love only be for her the Charon who took her through a river of hell to the shores of death, as he had been to AimÉe DesclÉe?

Or would she leave behind her all those beautiful faiths and fancies, all those innocent ardours and tender thoughts, as the year leaves behind it the blossoms of spring, the young green of April: and would she become famous and flattered, leading the world in a leash, and putting her foot on the necks of her lovers?

He liked one vision as little as the other.

Either way the sea-bird of Bonaventure would be no more; either way the child who had gone away from him in the moonlight under the silver shadows of the olive-trees and of the mists of dawn would be as dead as though she were in her grave. Would the time ever come when she would say to him, 'Why did you not let me die on the stones of Paris instead of keeping life in me for this?' Or would time give her that brazen disk of which Rosselin had spoken, and with it the heart of bronze which all must have instead of a heart of flesh and blood if they would go triumphant through the heat and pressure of the world? Rosselin had said aright, that the disk of brass would spoil the fair white statue, and the heart of bronze, the heart of the mockers of men, the heart of Venus Lubetina, would it ever be hers?

He went home to his own house, where he was expecting his wife's return that evening. He went into his own rooms and looked at the sketch made by Loris Loswa. The sight of it troubled and disturbed him. He had a sense of wrong doing upon him of which, when he searched his own conscience, he could with honesty declare himself blameless. He had put her as much out of his own hands as it had been possible to do, and the simple ruse by which he had been able to provide for her maintenance seemed as innocent as any pretence by which the motherless lamb can be persuaded to eat or the unfledged bird to let itself be befriended by gentle hands. Still it had been a subterfuge; it had been an untruth; and he hated the merest shadow of falsehood. His detestation of it had been the constant subject of Friederich Othmar's ridicule and sarcasm, and the elder man had in vain argued with him a thousand times, to endeavour to prove to him that it is, in the hands of a skilled casuist, at once the most forcible and the most delicate of weapons. He had always refused to admit its virtues; it seemed to him a craven and contemptible thing, however dressed up with wit and wisdom.

That Blanchette de Laon had seen him at Chevreuse had kept him from returning thither, and it also made him feel the absolute necessity of acquainting his wife with all he had done for Damaris before Rumour, with her hundred tongues, and women, with their devilish ingenuity in exaggeration and suggestion, should have bruited the tale abroad in some guise wholly unlike the truth of it. If he could by good fortune place the story before her in such a light that it would move her finer and more generous impulses, then all would be well. But this was so doubtful; the quixotism of his own conduct would be the first thing which would strike her, and she would probably be unsparing in her ridicule of it. Besides, the reception of his narrative would wholly depend on her mood, on the trifles of the moment, on the facts of whether or no she were in a sympathetic and kindly humour. Any trifle would do to determine that: if the rooms were not heated enough, if the flowers in them were not those she liked, if the costumes of the coming season seemed ugly to her, or if she had caught a slight chill on her journey—any one of these things, or anything similar to them, would make any appeal to her generosity and sympathy worse than useless.

He had been so long accustomed to study the barometer of her caprices that he dreaded its mutability. He knew that there were in her instincts and elements of nobility, even of greatness, which, could she have been cast on troublous times and dire disasters, would have made her rise to sacrifice, even to heroism. As it was, in her perpetual self-gratification, her unlimited power of command, her bed of unruffled roses, and her atmosphere of incessant adulation, all the capriciousness and egotism of her nature were encouraged and nursed to overweening growth.

In the depths of her nature were those finer qualities which will always respond to the appeal of higher emotions in moments of extremity or the hours of great calamity or of great peril. She would have had the dignity of Marie Antoinette before the Convention, the courage of Anne de Montfort before Philippe de Valois, the strength of Maria Theresa before Europe. But nothing less than the inspiration of such supreme hours of life could have penetrated the indifference of her temperament, and the trivialities and the frivolities of modern existence could never do so for an instant.

Had he sought her pardon for some great crime, sought her fidelity through some great ruin, he might, he probably would have aroused the latent forces and sympathies dormant in her character; she would not have given him a stone when he had asked for bread. But in the things of daily life he had found her too often without mercy to have in her mercies much trust.

The conviction that she would never give him the comprehension which he wished made him withhold all other utterances of his deeper emotions and more tender thoughts. He had gone to her in one supreme moment of pain, and he had received a rebuff such as repels for long, if not for ever, a sensitive nature.

She did not realise that her infinite comprehension of the moods and minds of others was marred to them by the chill raillery which accompanied her acute perceptions. She did not remember that though to herself the dilemmas and the weaknesses, even the passions which she studied were objects of amused ridicule, they were to those on whom she studied them subjects of great moment, and often of as great suffering.

Even the men who most blindly loved her were afraid to confide in her, because of the inevitable irony with which their confidence was certain to be met. Many a time Othmar himself had longed to lean his head on her knees, and lay bare to her all the contradictions, and longings, and regrets of his soul; but he had never dared to do so, because he had always shrunk from the certain mockery which would, he knew, point through all her sympathy, if sympathy she would ever give. Her comprehension of human nature made her in one sense the most lenient of auditors; but in another sense she was the most unsparing: she could pardon easily, but she could never promise not to ridicule. That one fact held sensitive natures aloof from her with all the force of a scourge.

'She will deem me such a fool,' he thought often: and then he kept silence.

He went this evening down to the Gare du Nord to receive her, and almost before the train had paused he had entered the saloon carriage in which she had travelled undisturbed since she had left Berlin. There was always in him something of the eagerness after absence of a lover; her mere presence always exercised over him a magnetism and a charm.

She raised herself on her elbow from the mass of sable furs and of wadded satin on which she had been lying; she had been rudely awakened by the cessation of the train's movement; the blaze of a lamp was in her eyes; she was impatient, and she yawned.

'Otho! my dear Otho!' she said with petulance, 'why will you always come to meet one at a railway station? Of all the many absurd customs of our generation that is the most absurd. Nobody's emotions are so poignant that they cannot wait till one comes into the house. I was asleep. What a cold night! Why cannot they devise something which would carry the train straight to one's bedside? All their inventions are very clumsy after all.'

She was slowly raising herself from her heap of furs and red satin; her eyes were languid with arrested sleep; her tone was irritable and irritating: she scarcely seemed to perceive his presence; the sweet delicate odour as of tea-roses with which all her clothes were always impregnated came to him well known as the accents of her voice. A curious passion of conflicting feeling passed over him; he could have seized her in his arms and cried aloud to her, 'I have given you all my life, do you give me no more than this?' Yet he felt chilled, angered, alienated, silenced for the moment; a feeling which was almost dislike came over him; it seemed to him as if he had poured out all the love of his life upon her and received in return a mere handful of ice and snow. But the inexorable haste and vulgar trivialities of modern exigencies left him no moment for thought or for the expression of it. He could only offer her his hand in silence to assist her to alight, and give her his arm and lead her through the throngs of the Northern Terminus to her own carriage.

He drove with her through the streets to their own house and escorted her to the apartments which were especially hers.

'I dare not disturb you longer to-night,' he said with a certain bitterness of tone which he could not control. 'The children wished to remain up to welcome you, but I did not allow them to do so; I know how you despise undisciplined feeling.'

She laughed a little languidly, letting her women remove her fur wrappings, whilst she stood in the delicious warmth and light of the rooms where thousands of hothouse roses were gathered together in welcome of her return, filling the hot air with their fragrance.

'Do you mean that for satire?' she said with a little yawn. 'Do not try to be sardonic, it does not suit you. The children are certainly much better in bed. I will go and look at them after I have had a bath. I am very tired. Goodnight.'

She gave him a sleepy sign of dismissal, then chid her women for being slow. Had they her pine-bath ready?—there was no bath so good after fatigue and cold.

He left her presence with pain and anger, despite the coldness which came over him towards her: coldness born from her own as the frosts of the earth come from the cold of the atmosphere. His adoration of her had been too integral a part of his life for her touch, her voice, her glance, not to have a certain empire over him which no other woman would ever obtain.

In the forenoon, quite late, he was again admitted to her presence. She had recovered her fatigue, she was serene and almost kind, but the children were there: they were not alone five minutes. Later, she gave audience to all the great faiseurs, whose intelligence had been busied inventing marvels of costume for her for the winter season. Later yet, there came some of her intimate friends and some of her most devoted courtiers.

It was raining heavily in the streets, but in her apartments there were hothouse heat and hothouse fragrance, in the sultry air and amidst the innumerable roses it was hard to believe that it was the thirtieth of November. People came and went, laughed and chattered; she wrote notes, sent messages, telegraphed many contradictory orders to her tradespeople; the day was crowded and entertaining; there was a certain stimulant, even for her, in the sense that she was in Paris.

Othmar did not see her again until they met at dinner. BÉthune dined there, and four or five other persons, who had called and been invited that afternoon. The day was a type of all other days of her life.

Othmar thought with impatience and bitterness of the dreams he had dreamed. She despised the world and ridiculed it; yet who was more absorbed by it? Who was less able to live without it? She always spoke with her lips of the fatigue of society, but, as he thought angrily, she was not so weary that she was ever willing to forsake it. All the year round it was about her. Every season saw her where its fashion, its pastimes, its flatteries, were most largely to be found. Without that atmosphere of adulation, of luxury, and of excitement she would have been lost. The world was a poor affair, no doubt, not anything like what if might be were people more inventive and more courageous. She had said so a hundred times; but still there was nothing better than its movement. To read Plato all day under an oak-tree, or to sit alone by a library fire with a volume of Sully Prudhomme, would not be any improvement on it, though it might be more philosophic.

To his fancy, life together was poor and meaningless, unless it implied mutual sympathy and communion of feeling. He was a romanticist, as she had always told him. To his views it was not in any way an ideal of either love or happiness to be for ever surrounded by the fever of the great world, to be for ever separated by its demands and its excitements, to meet only on the common ground of mutual interests, to dwell under the same roof with little more intimacy than two strangers met there at a house-party. It appeared that this was what she now expected, what she now preferred. His pride prevented him from struggling against her decrees; but he felt, and loathed to feel, that he was insensibly approaching a position towards her scarcely higher than that which Napraxine had occupied. True, she still had moments of exquisite charm, of irresistible sorcery, in which she occasionally deigned to remember that he had been the lover of her choice; and in these she bent his will and turned his brain almost as much as in the earlier years of his idolatry. But these moments were rare, and when they came appealed to the senses in him, and not to the heart; they left him unnerved, they did not satisfy his affections.

The world had so many claims upon her: his were forgotten or ignored. Where were the visions he had had of a life out of the world, poetic, unworldly, tuned to another key than the brazen clangour of society? They were gone for ever like last year's roses.

The so-called pleasures of life had never had attraction for him; they were a mere routine; he was tired of crowds, of flattery, of splendour, of movement; he was tired of the women who tried to beguile, and the men who endeavoured to use, him; the whole thing seemed to him witless, tedious, tame. She, who had always declared that it was so, yet could find her diversion in dazzling it and stimulating its envy; though most things failed to please her, yet, like all women, her own power pleased her always; but he had no such resource, for the power which he had (that of wealth) he despised.

A sense of failure came wearily upon him during this evening which followed on her return. If this were all the issue of great passion and great love, what use were either?

The world was a pageant to her, and he might stand by and see her pass in it. The rÔle did not please him. He fancied—no doubt he told himself it was but fancy—that the world ridiculed him in that subordinate place, that half-effaced position, that too indulgent acceptance of her continual caprices, tyrannies, and slights.

He did not remember, did not know, that he himself in Russia had seemed cold to her. He was only sensible of the barrier which had grown up between them, of the indifference with which his presence or his absence was regarded by her. Gradually, as the fine mist of approaching rain steals over a sunny country, dimming the colours and effacing the lines of it little by little, until nothing is seen but the colourless blur of the wide white rain itself, so the sensation of dissatisfaction, of disappointment, of disunion had come over the tenor of their lives together. The consciousness of it brought to him a profound and passionate sense of irreparable loss. A word from her would have dispelled it, an hour of full belief that she had ever loved him as he had once loved her would have sufficed to sweep it away; but the word was never spoken, the hour never came. Time only strengthened his conviction that, were he dead before her, she would not greatly care.

The sense of the incompleteness of his own life came upon him with a strong consciousness as he stood in his brilliant rooms with the laughter of his wife and her guests borne to his ear, and the sounds of some gay music coming to him from another salon. He might have ten, twenty, thirty, forty years more of this existence, and its years, its days, its hours would always be precisely like this year, this day, this hour. The future seemed to rise up like a phantom and say to him, 'The past gave you the fulfilment of your greatest desire. I shall give you nothing but the fruit of that fulfilment. If that fruit do not content you, whose fault is that?'

Men whose wishes are thwarted can throw the blame on fate if their lives prove barren; but he had passionately wished for one thing, and all the forces of life and of death had joined together to give it him. He had no one to reproach, no unkind destiny to upbraid, if the gift left his heart cold, his soul cheerless; if he felt at times a mortal loneliness, and at times a weariness of vague regret.

The cruelty of all great passions is that, after their fruition, there must come this inevitable regret. They are altogether beyond the pale of daily life; they can never fraternise with the demands of social existence. She had once said truly that death is the kindest friend to love, because it saves it from being made ridiculous by daily habit and worn away by daily friction.

The world is wrong when it pities Romeo, when it weeps for Stradella.

The great love he had borne her had survived all those trials of familiarity and of habit which are crueller enemies to love than absence or than death. It had been the romantic passion of Romeo united to that depth and unity of devotion which Friederich Othmar had been wont slightingly to call the knight's love for his lady. It had been so essentially interwoven with his life that it had always seemed to him it could only go away from him with life itself.

The idea that a love so great should yet have the same fate as have all the little passions of a frivolous hour was still intolerable to him. With him it had been of those passions which ennoble and enlarge human nature, because, though interwoven with the senses, they yet embrace the soul, and are drawn by their very idolatry to that longing for immortality which is the only possible approach to faith in it.

But he knew that he had never moved her thus; he knew that, if he had ever given utterance to all he felt, she would have listened with a derisive compassion as to the exaggeration of a mind distraught. The crystal clearness, the acute penetration, the ingrained scepticism of her intellect made impossible to her those illusions and those hopes which are so dear to minds more imaginative than critical, to temperaments more impassioned than logical, as was his.

He had given his whole life away to her, and she did not even care for the gift; scarcely deigned to accept it, except in conventional shape. He was unreasonable, no doubt, as she would have told him had he said so to her. He had asked of life and passion what neither can give—immortality. All which serve to console the great majority of mankind did not avail to console him for that loss.

Most men grow content with the crowd which is constantly about them, with the host of petty interests which claim them, with the repetition of pleasures and pursuits which is enforced on them; their days are dull, but they are full; they are consumed by monotony, but they are unconscious of its tedium, because they have no imagination and often no passion.

Othmar could not be thus reconciled to the disappointments and the sameness of existence. He required life to be a poem, and he was not consoled because it proved a mere diary.

The new year brought him without break that increase of occupation which makes it a season of such weariness to all who are of any importance in the world, and have a crowd of supplicants and petitioners always looking to them for support. Himself he would have liked to pass the winter season at AmyÔt, but to her it was useless even to suggest it.

'You cannot ask the world to bury itself in a frozen wood by a river in flood,' she had said when once he had wished to do so.

'But is the world absolutely necessary?'

'If it were not there what should we do? You would read Plato perhaps for the thousandth time; I could not promise to read Goethe for the hundredth. The country in winter is like a man of eighty repeating a poem on spring.'

'It is just possible that the man of eighty might feel the meaning of the poem more thoroughly than the boy of eighteen.'

'His feelings would not prevent him from looking absurd.'

'I suppose, you at least would never pity him?'

'Most surely not.'

'What would you pity?' he said bitterly.

She smiled. 'I should not pity people who could shut themselves up in damp forests on the Loire water in midwinter. A Russian winter is quite a different thing; the air is like champagne, the frost is like diamonds, the plains are like marble; it is charming to have one's roses and palms in a temperature of 30° RÉaumur, and by merely going out of doors plunge en pleine SibÉrie. That is why I am a very patriotic Russian. I love the intensity of its contrasts.'

'As Marie Stuart loved Chastelard and Bothwell!' said Othmar with a certain significance.

'Should you think she loved either of them? I should doubt it. They loved her, and being stupid as men only are, they compromised her.'

'I dare say she thought of all men as you do!—as a little higher than the horse, a little lower than the dog! No more!' said Othmar with some impatience.

She smiled: 'Perhaps! I am not sure that it is a bad compliment. Where should we put you in the seat of creation—Mary Stuart and I—who cannot adore you as Penelope and Hermione can?'

'I never hoped to be adored!' said Othmar with some bitterness.

'Oh, yes; you did, one day. All men hope for it, only they do not get it,—except from Griseldis whom they beat, and from Gretchen whom they forsake.'

They were alone in their drawing-room in the vacant five minutes before a great dinner party. He looked at her wistfully. What woman was ever comparable to her, he thought; where else were that exquisite grace, that entrancing languor, that supreme distinction in every movement and in every attitude? The very tones of her voice, sweet as the sound of any silver bell, and cold as the breath of frost, had a charm in it that no other's had. With a sudden impulse of reviving ardour he stooped and pushed the loose glove from her arm, and kissed the white soft skin beneath it. But she, remembering and resentful of the weeks in Russia, drew it from his caress with her chilliest rebuke:

'My dear Otho! we are neither children nor lovers!'

He was repulsed and silent.

At that moment their groom of the chambers announced that some of their coming guests, who were of imperial name and place, were entering the gates.

He and she together descended the grand staircase between the lines of their servants in state liveries.

'Together like this!' thought Othmar. 'Together in these pageantries, these conventionalities, these mummeries; but never in any other hours, in any other way!'