It was now towards the close of carnival. Othmar's time, always largely occupied, and doubly burdened since the death of his uncle, left him but little leisure for the studies and the thoughts most natural to his mind. His temperament led him to the love of leisure, of privacy, of meditation. To read Plato under an oak-tree all day, as she suggested, however insufficient it might have seemed to her, would have been to him the most congenial of occupations. He would have chosen Vaucluse, like Petrarca, could he have done so.

Amidst all the variety of affairs which came before him he was often tired with that fatigue of the mind which is more painful than the fatigue of the body. Study, even over-study, does not produce that fatigue; what produces it is the constant pressure of uncongenial and constantly-recurrent demands upon mental attention. Since the death of Friederich Othmar such demands upon him had been multiplied a hundredfold; and whilst all Paris looked on him as one of the most enviable of its great personages, he himself would willingly have given all his millions to be free to pass his years in the intellectual leisure and repose which were to him the chief excellence of life.

'He has remained Wilhelm Meister and Werter, though an unkind fate has made him a rival of the Rothschilds,' his wife had said once. And a student at heart he did remain, and a dreamer also whenever the thunder of the brazen chariots of the world around him left him any peaceful moment in which to enjoy silence and remember the dreams of his youth.

The moments grew rarer and wider apart every year. He was like the king on Burne-Jones's wheel of fortune: he was crowned, but bound on the wheel.

Therefore, in the press of great interests and of public matters, which despite himself absorbed so much of his thoughts and of his time, the remembrance of Damaris was no dominant thing, but a tender and fugitive memory which came to him ever and again, as the song of a bird on a bough outside his windows may bring the gentle thoughts of other days to the hearer of it who sits shut up in a close room under a zinc roof in a city. Whenever he remembered her it was with infinite pity, with great anxiety, with little of those more selfish impulses which tinge a man's thoughts of a woman, always with an almost passionate desire to undo the wrong which had been done her by his wife.

'What can I do for her? Command me in all ways,' he had said more than once to Rosselin, who had always answered: 'Perhaps the best thing you can do is to let her alone.'

He had many thoughts of her which troubled him, and vague projects which he was forced to abandon as impracticable. He wished to give her back the island, set her there in simple sovereignty over the orange trees and the sea-waves, restore to her her beautiful free open-air existence amongst the sea-swallows and the olive-haunting thrushes. He would have striven to do it at all cost; but the isle was not to be bought. The owner believed it to be a mountain of treasure, since it was sought for, and would not part with it at any price. There was no possibility for him to give her back her little realm, to make her life anything he would have liked to make it. He could only leave her alone, as Rosselin had bluntly told him to do; and that cold kindness did not satisfy the generosity of his temper, or seem suited to the softness and helplessness of her years.

This day when he had watched his wife's carriage roll through the gates of the courtyard, his conscience smote him especially for what seemed to him neglect and unkindness to one who had no other friend than himself.

On an impulse of compassion and repentance he went out of the house and took the train which goes west on its way to the sea-shores of BrÉtagne.

'Poor child,' he thought. 'Fear of them makes me a coward to her. She must have deemed me unkind and neglectful; all these weeks and months I have never been near her. Time goes so fast——'

He alighted at the little station of Trappes, and took his way on foot across the fields towards the Croix Blanche.

The weather, though dull and grey, had been rainless as the train passed through the market-gardens and shabby suburbs of the north-west, but when he reached Magny the valley in its silvery fog looked poetic, and wore a charm all its own after the dreary bricks and mortar of the outer-boulevards. The leafless woods wore lovely hues of bronze and ashen-grey; the bare fields were of the red-brown of a stag's hind; far away the plains of La Beauce were veiled in a mist which promised snow; a man went by him carrying cut wood with the bowed back, the bent head, the heavy step, the downcast face which Millet has made immortal in art.

'How have we managed to make a toil and a burden of that outdoor life which was so blessed to the Greeks'?' he mused. 'We must have blundered horribly. Or is it the weather which is more at fault than we? In the south, pastoral life is still enjoyable and still graceful.'

He spoke to the woodman and got only sullen monosyllables in return. He gave him some money, and saw the slow dull eye lit up with surprise and greed.

'I should be as sullen and as covetous myself, I daresay,' he thought, 'if I had to cut faggots for a living.'

Then he went on over the fields along the cross-road which led to the home of Damaris.

He had not yet reached it, when he perceived her at a little distance, walking quickly, with the white dogs running before her. She had on a long dark cloak, and the hood of it, lined with crimson, was drawn over her head; her head was a little thrown backward; her eyes were looking upward at the steel-grey sky, across whose sad-coloured vault a flock of the farm pigeons flew. Her hands held an open book; her lips were moving, but he was too far off from her to hear the sound of her voice. Her feet came quickly over the brown bare pasture so that she almost touched him ere she saw him. When she did so she dropped the book; the colour in her face changed instantly from white to red, from red to white. She gave an inarticulate cry of pleasure and amaze.

'You! you!—at last!' she said, holding out to him both her hands, warm with the warmth of youth, though gloveless, in the winter weather.

Othmar took them in his own with a tender gesture and touched them with his lips.

He could not doubt the great joy which his presence brought to her. Her eyes were shining through suddenly starting tears of gladness; her mouth was tremulous with smiles; her cheeks had flushed scarlet; her whole face and form were eloquent of a happiness which needed no words for its expression.

He thought of a languid, amused, disdainful voice which had said to him awhile before, 'Surely anyone's emotions can restrain themselves until one gets into the house!'

The welcome of Damaris affected him profoundly, touched him to a vivid gratitude. He was so used to the repression of his warmer feelings, so accustomed to irony and languor, and the ridicule of all ardour and enthusiasm, that this delight which his presence caused was to him at once infinitely pathetic and deliciously responsive. He was thankful to be paid in such unwonted coin, and the beautiful sincerity of it was clear and radiant as the sunrise of a summer morning.

'I should have come before if I had known——,' he said, and paused with a pang of conscience. Was it not a reason rather to compel his absence?

Damaris was not sensible of any double meaning in either his words or his silence. She was abandoned to the pure and frank rapture with which she saw the living man of whom the memory abode with her sleeping and waking. There was so much youth in her, and so perfect a candour, that no thought of concealment entered her mind for an instant. He had been everything to her; he had stood between her and sickness and misery and death; he had made life bloom again for her when it had seemed engulfed in the blackness of poverty and solitude. To her he had been truly a ministering angel. She could have wept and laughed for joy at the touch of his hand, at the sound of his voice.

Othmar was embarrassed: she was not. He was conscious of the meaning of her happiness; she was not. He let go her hands, and moved beside her under the leafless trees.

'May we go into the house?' he asked. He remembered Blanche de Laon.

'Yes,' she answered; her voice was tremulous with emotion, and had the thrill of an exquisite happiness in it.

'You see, it is quite near,' she added. 'It is so long since you came! Why have you been so long?'

Othmar did not look at her as he replied:

'My dear, I have so many occupations, so few moments that I may call my own. And I had told you to write to me if you needed me.'

'I do not write very well,' she said, with a blush of shame at the confession. 'And I thought you would come when you wished.'

'When I could, would be more nearly the truth. I am not my own master in many ways.'

'No?'

To her it sounded very strange; to her he seemed the master of the world.

'No, indeed,' said Othmar bitterly.

He walked silently beside her a few moments. His dejection of tone, his weariness of manner communicated something of their sadness to her, and threw their shade over the shadowless and innocent joys of her soul. He roused himself with an effort.

'And you—I have heard of you often from Rosselin. Believe me, I did not forget you, if I seemed neglectful. You love the open air still, I see, though it is the chill grey air of the Seine-et-Oise instead of your own warm winter sunshine. What were you reading or reciting?—Dona Sol?'

'Yes.'

She had ceased to look up at him with candid luminous eyes; her face was downcast and her cheeks burned. A vague sense stole on her of the utter difference between himself and her; of the fact that, though he was all the earth held for her, she to him could only be a mere passing thought, a mere occasional interest, a mere waif to be pitied and aided and forgotten. His life was so crowded, so absorbed, so full of the world's gifts and the world's honours, she could expect nothing in it but here and there an instant of remembrance. She led the way into the dwelling-house in silence. The recollection of his wife had come to her: of that great lady who had tempted her, ridiculed her, forgotten her, and been her fate.

Where was she?

What did she know of herself?

She did not ask him; her joyous face grew dark under the shadow of the crimson hood drawn above her shining curls. If the mother of Napraxine could have seen into her heart at that moment her aged lips would have given the kiss of peace to these young ones for sake of the hatred her young soul felt.

'They are all away at work,' she said aloud; 'will you come into my room? I think the fire is not out.'

'I do not care about the fire,' replied Othmar. 'I wish I could bring you the sunshine of your own seas and shores—or take you to them.'

She did not answer; he asked again:

'Why would you not write to me?'

'I do not write very well, I told you,' she said, with the colour still hot in her cheeks; 'and I have no right to trouble you—in that way. It is cold here. Will you come to my room?'

She went up a few wooden stairs and opened the door of the little chamber, of which she had made her study. It had an open fireplace, and wood was burning on the hearth; its lattice window showed the wintry landscape. It was simple, but looked like the room of an artist: the books, the engravings, the water-colour sketches, the little statuettes he had sent there to make it habitable and picturesque, gave it that air of culture without which a palace is no better than a barn; a copper bowl was filled with ivy and bay and holly, there were some snowdrops in a glass which stood before a small bronze he had sent there, in the summer, of a Greek shepherd playing on a reed. What there was of art and decoration there was of his providing; but still a certain grace of arrangement and harmony of tones were due to her and to the same instincts in her which had made of her sea balcony on Bonaventure a little hermitage dedicated to the few nightingales and the many sea-swallows, and, amidst the sordid cares and the harsh accents which were around her, had enabled her to hear the voice of Ruy Blas or of Fortunio, as, hid in the orange-grove, she had read through drowsy noons in

A dim house of happy leaves, with shadows populous.

As he looked around this chamber with its union of elegance and rusticity, there passed over his mind the consciousness of how utterly his wife would mistake the motive which had brought him there, the feeling which had prompted him to have this child surrounded, as far as it was possible, with such simple pleasures as art and nature can bestow on poetic temperaments. The world was always with her; its influences had saturated her mind and coloured her judgments too deeply for her ever to judge otherwise than as the world would do. To her as to the world, if ever either became aware of this home which he had made for another woman under the ash-trees of Les Hameaux, he could only seem the protector of Damaris in a very different sense to that in which he actually was so. The certainty of such inevitable judgment oppressed him, and obscured to him the beauty of the girl's face, the lovely freshness and fervour of her welcome.

The one great love of his life had been so long his only preoccupation, his only idolatry, that it hurt him with a sense of loss and of insult to think that to others it would seem as though he had been faithless to it. Even the sense which was present to his own heart and mind, that such infidelity might perchance become possible to him, humiliated him in his own eyes and made him feel a weak, irresolute, mutable fool.

'Perhaps she is right enough to disdain me!' he thought with impatience of himself.

His thoughts were far more with her than with Damaris; and yet the poor child's welcome of him sunk into his heart with a sense of warmth and of sympathy, to which he had long been a stranger. Her very personal beauty, too, seemed to retain in it the glow of her own suns, and to give to those who looked on it a vivifying warmth and radiance. He felt as though, in leaving the presence of his wife for hers, he had come out of the cool pale luminance of moonlight, shining on the classic limbs of a marble goddess, into a sunlit and fragrant garden, with birds at play amongst wild boughs of roses.

Absorbed in his own meditations, his words were dreamy and spoken with effort, his abstraction affected the sensitive nerves of his companion and cast a chill upon her buoyant and ardent nature. She grew silent, and watched him with eyes passionate with gratitude and dim with tears. She saw in him the saviour of her life, the lord of all her thoughts, her only friend; she longed to throw herself at his feet and strive to tell him all she felt. But she could not, she dared not; there was something in his voice, in his gaze, in the mere fact of his presence, which daunted and held her dumb. In his absence she had repeated to herself a thousand times the eloquent words with which she would tell him all she felt; but now that he was there before her, she was mute. The colour came and went in her expressive face, the veins in her throat swelled with emotion; she could find nothing to say which was worth saying; when she spoke in the words of the poets she was eloquent, but when she could only look in her own heart and long to speak, how poor she seemed to herself, how dull and dumb!

The intensity of the happiness his presence brought with it, in itself bewildered and alarmed her with a vague fear to which she could have given no name had she tried. She had been happy in her childhood upon Bonaventure, with the happiness of youth and health and vigour; the happiness of the fawn in the fernbrake, of the swallow on the wing; unconscious, delightful, instinctive happiness in the mere sense of sentient life. But this happiness which she felt now was new to her, and closely allied to pain, and nervous as its twin-sister, sorrow; she was afraid of it and mute.

At last she broke the silence timidly:

'There was something I thought I would write to tell you because he is one of your friends, but then I thought it did not matter. It was only that M. de BÉthune has been here twice or three times.'

'BÉthune!' echoed Othmar with astonishment and some displeasure. 'How came he here?'

She told him, and added 'He has come back on different days. He brought me a jewel once; it was very handsome. It was because I attended to his horse's sprain; I asked him to take it back again and he did so. Since that he has brought me flowers. Those flowers are some of his.'

He looked where she looked and saw a group of hothouse blossoms of value and rarity. He felt an annoyance which he did not dissimulate. 'Do he and his flowers please you?' he asked, not wisely as he knew.

But the perfect candour of her eyes remained unclouded.

'I do not think about him,' she replied in that tone which was an echo of her free and fearless life upon the island. 'He is kind, and M. Rosselin says he is good. He is a great friend of hers, is he not?'

'Of my wife's?' said Othmar, with irritation. 'Yes. She likes him, he is often with her; he is one of those persons whom great ladies care to chain to their thrones.'

He had himself always had a vague jealousy of Gui de BÉthune; the intimacy which his wife allowed him, although only, he knew, in accordance with the habits and usages of a woman of the world, yet was always more intimate than he cared to see. He knew the solidity and nobility of BÉthune's character and the hopeless devotion which had so long absorbed his heart, but sometimes he thought that his wife might have found better ways of rewarding the one and of curing the other than the constant attendance on her which she permitted to a man who had adored her before the death of Napraxine, and had offered her his hand after it. He had said little against it, because he had known how absurd and vulgar a passion jealousy had always seemed in her sight, but there had never been any cordiality of intercourse between himself and BÉthune, and it irritated him to hear that BÉthune of all men should, by an accident of sport, have found his way to Les Hameaux.

The idea had caused him uneasiness, and associated with the remembrance of Blanche de Laon, made him conscious that the secret of the vale of Chevreuse had been very rashly and consciously kept by him from his wife. The Duc was a man of chivalrous honour and fastidious delicacy; he would in all likelihood feel bound to respect a secret which he had accidentally suppressed, but the influence of NadÈge was unbounded with him, and if by any chance through the malice of Blanchette, or any other means, her suspicions should be in any way aroused, she would turn the mind of BÉthune inside out as easily as a child can empty a bird's nest. He knew her great power over men, and the tenacity with which she would at times follow out an idea if it were one which appeared to elude her, or which others sought to conceal from her.

'Does he know your story?' he asked, with some embarrassment. 'Have you mentioned me to him?'

'Oh no!'—the colour flushed into her face, there was indignation in her denial. 'Do you think that I would talk of—of—of that time and of you?'

Her voice trembled a little over the last word; she added after a moment,

'He speaks of her sometimes—of you never.'

'Ah!'

Othmar understood the meaning of that, though his companion did not.

The admiration and loyalty with which her visitor had spoken of a lady who was nothing to him, had seemed even to her unworldly ignorance something which Othmar would not like. She, who had only seen the homely lives of the toilers of the sea and soil, with their primitive passions and their single-minded ideas, did not dream of the easy relations and the elastic opinions which exist in the great world, of the friendships which have all the grace of love without its fatigue and its bondage, of the influence which brilliant women can exercise over the minds and lives of men, without giving in return one iota of their own freedom or feeling one pulse of tenderness. All those intricate motives, and half-dissolute, half-delicate, liberties which prevail in society, were to her unknown, unimaginable. She could understand that a woman or a man should die for love, or should in an hour of hatred slay what they were jealous of, or what had robbed them of their love. All the simple deep undivided emotions of life were intelligible to her and aroused response in her nature, but the refinements of caprice and of fancy, the subtleties of cultured minds playing with passions which they were too languid and too hypocritical to share, these were altogether unintelligible to her.

In her short life she had not lived with the rude labouring folk who had been her sole companions, without knowing that men could be faithless and women also. But in the only people she had ever known, fidelity had had a rude and literal interpretation, and infidelity had often been roughly chastised by a blow of the knife, or the scourge of a rope's end. All the refined gradations of inconstancy in the great world were wholly unimaginable by her.

'You will have to live ten years more before you can play in Sardou's pieces,' Rosselin had said one day to her; 'as yet you must remain with the poets, with the eternal children, with the eternal Naturkinder.'

'Perhaps,' Rosselin had added to himself, 'she will never be able to play Dora, or Froufrou, only Adrienne Lecouvreur, or Marie Stuart. She has a character cast on broad bold antique lines; simple and profound feelings alone are natural to her. The intricacies of complex emotion, and the contempt born of analysis, are not intelligible to her. She would understand why the Duchesse de Septmonts throws the cup down so violently in "L'EtrangÈre," but she would not understand why Froufrou vacillates so helplessly between her family and her lover.'

She looked wistfully now at Othmar, afraid that she had displeased him, yet urged on by the unconquerable attraction which the character of his wife exercised over her:

'Why has she so much power over people?' she asked in a low voice.

'My wife?' asked Othmar, who was absorbed in his own thoughts. 'How can I tell you, my dear? Perhaps she has it because she does not care about it; perhaps because all men seem to her to be fools; perhaps because nature has made her cleverer than we are: how can I tell you? There are persons born into this world with a magnetic power over the minds of others: she is one of them. You have seen it yourself; she was an utter stranger to you, yet she said but two words to you, and you followed her, and all your peaceful, and innocent, and happy life went to pieces like a child's sand-city before the tide of the sea. She can always do that. She has done it a million times. She has done it with this man you speak of; she looked at him once years and years ago, and he has never been free any more. Other women hardly exist for him. He would prefer to be wretched following her shadow, than to be happy where she was not. There are others like him——'

The face of Damaris grew troubled and embarrassed, there was a sound of indignation in her voice as she said: 'But since she is your wife?'

Othmar laughed a little bitterly.

'Ah, my dear child!—you belong to another world than ours. You have seen amongst your fisher-folk and your fruit-sellers a kind of union of labour, which is called marriage, and which makes the woman toil all day for her children and her house, and grow grey on one hearthstone, and live out her life with the sun shining on one narrow field. You do not understand that when a great lady does a man the honour to accept his hand in marriage, she retains her own complete immunity from all obligations whatever; she only remains beside him on the tacit condition that he shall submit to all her terms; she makes his houses brilliant, she amuses herself, and he can do the same if nature have not made him too dull; she has a number of friendships and interests with which he has nothing to do; and if his heart remain unsatisfied, that is nothing to her—he can take it elsewhere.'

There was the bitterness of personal feeling in the words spoken, as if in impersonal generalisation. His hearer did not penetrate all their meanings, but she felt the personal offence and dissatisfaction which were in them, and they filled her with a wistful and sympathetic sorrow. She did not understand. How could people be so rich, so great, so beautiful, have so much power in their hands, and so much love at their command, and yet be for ever so restless, so weary, so dissatisfied? Her heart hardened itself more utterly than ever against this woman who had such empire, and used it with such cruelty; who was so beloved, and so contemptuous of love; who bore his name, dwelt in his houses, could see him when she would, and yet seemed to give him no more rest or kindness than she gave a stranger passing in the street. The reasons of it were all too intricate and too subtle for her mind to be able to guess one half of them. In her own simplicity of phrase she would have said only that he was unhappy, which would not have covered one half, or one tithe of the truth; but that scanty knowledge was enough to make all her own intensity of gratitude and devotion to him yearn with longing to console him, and sink heartsick before its own impotency to do so.

All through the months in which he had been absent, she had thought of him with wistful memories, vague troubled thoughts, of which he was the centre and ideal. The remembrance of his light grave kiss upon her brow had thrilled through her with a magical force, banishing childhood. All her warm and passionate heart, rich as the fruits of her native land, was given to him unasked, unconscious of all it gave. Never in any hour of her empire over him had the woman to whom he had given up all he possessed, his past, his present, and his future, known one single pulse of such love for him as filled the whole nerve and soul and nature of Damaris BÉrarde.

She would have gone blindfold wherever he had led. She would have died happy if gathered one moment to his breast.

But as yet she knew it not. As yet her own heart was a sealed book to her. To him it was open; he could read on it what he would; but he was unwilling to read.

'Have we not done her harm enough,' he asked himself, 'that I should do her this last, this greatest? Shall I bind her to me in her youth and her ignorance when I can but give her, what?—an hour of my time, a fragment of my thoughts, the cold hospitality of a heart which has been swept empty by another woman?'

He looked at her where she stood, with the grey light of the pale day powerless to dull or take away the warmth and depth of colour, the strength and grace of outline from the form and face. The shining curls, the luminous eyes, the mouth like the bud of the pomegranate, the warm soft cheeks with the bright blood pulsing in them, they were just what they had been in the sea-wind, and the sun of the south; the pallor and cold of the north had had no dominion over them.

She had the triple beauty of youth, of health, of genius. There was the lavish glory of the springtime in her, as in the April fields when nature flings down flowers at every step. She should have been Heliodora to be crowned with white violets and blue hyacinths by the singer of Gadara, and he—if he had loved her, he might have opened his arms to her; but he looked in his own soul and no love of any kind was there.

Should he dare to offer her pale pity, mere tenderness, the fatigue of passions tired and chilled by another? What more unfair than for one weary and world-worn to lay his head upon the warm white breast of youth when he no more could dream there any of the dreams youth loves and love begets?

Damaris was perplexed and pained because he stayed so brief a time with her, for the low winter sun, already when he came so near to its last hour above the grey and purple of the plains, was still sinking red and dim in a western sky of smoke-like vapour, when he rose to leave her and return to Paris. She vaguely felt that there was some reserve between them, that all he thought was not expressed, that all he desired was not said.

In her ignorance of the waywardness and contradictions of the hearts of men, she could only think that he was angered with her for her persistency in a career which he had told her was not a happy or a wise one. To her it seemed that he had every right over her life, since without him she must have perished miserably amongst the unnoticed misery of the great city in which he had found her.

'You are not vexed that I was reciting the speeches of Dona Sol?' she asked him timidly, trying to find out what he wished.

'Vexed? Surely not,' he answered her. 'I understand that you still cling to this one thought, and since the ambition of it is so strong in you, it is no doubt best that you should give it an undivided devotion. We do nothing well that we do half-heartedly.'

'Does he tell you what he thinks of me?' she asked, still timidly.

'Rosselin?' said Othmar. 'Yes; he thinks greatly of your natural gifts; you content him, which is a rare thing, for he is hard to please; he believes you may move that dull, stupid, imitative mass which calls itself the world. I have never heard him say otherwise or say less. But neither Rosselin or I are gods, my child; we can push open the gates for you, but we cannot control what you may find beyond the gates.'

'You mean——?'

'I mean that his experience and influence will enable you to face the world with every advantage, will enable you to begin where others only arrive after long years of toil and of probation: but when he has done that he will have done all that he can do. The rest will lie with all the blind forces which govern human fates.'

There was something in the words, gently as they were spoken, which chilled her eager faiths and sanguine hopes, and brought back to her that fear of the future, that dread of the imprisonment of the art world, which had moved her after the recital of the Conservatoire.

'I begin to understand!' she said, with an impetuous sigh. 'It will be a slavery where I thought it a conquest. But—but—could not I have one triumph and then come back to the country and the quiet of it if I wished? Could I not make Paris crown me once, even if I gave the crown back to them? Why not?——'

'Because, drinking once, every one drinks as long as a drop is left of that amari aliquid called Fame. If you once taste triumph you will never return to obscurity. Did I not tell you so in the summer? Besides, why should you wish to triumph at all unless it be to give over your life to Art? I do not understand——'

The face of Damaris grew red and overcast.

'I want her to know that I need not be despised,' she said in a very low voice, through which there ran the thrill of a deep and sombre meaning. Othmar started and himself coloured at the menace which there was in the sound of her voice.

'You mean NadÈge?' he said abruptly.

Damaris gave a gesture of assent.

She was ashamed of what she had said, but it had escaped her almost involuntarily. He was silent. He was uncertain what to say. There was a sense of reluctance in him to speak at all of his wife to her. Commonplace words could have been said in plenty; but these he did not choose to employ. He understood that the whole strong and ardent soul of this child was on her lips; it was not a time for trivial platitudes, for empty phrases, which in moments of great emotions seem more unkind than blows.

'If I be your friend, my dear, you must not think of her as your enemy,' he said at length. 'She admires genius—it is the one thing which commands her respect: if you show her you possess it she will be a better friend to you than I can ever be.'

'I do not want her friendship.'

Damaris had grown pale; she spoke with impetuous and almost fierce meaning; the darker instincts which were in the hot blood of the BÉrardes were aroused; she did not pause to consider her own words.

It grew dark without: the sun had now sunk below the horizon; the red light of the fire on the hearth reached her and shone in her auburn curls, on her shining sombre eyes, on her lips shut close with scorn. She looked at him from under her level brows.

'You care for her very much?' she said suddenly.

Othmar was silent some moments. How much or how little should he show of his real thoughts to this child, who loved him and whom he could not love in any way as she deserved? He thought she had merited candour at the least from him.

'Yes, dear; I care for her very much, to use your words. She has been all the world to me; in a sense she will be so always. Every great passion has a certain immortal element in it; at least I think so. She has been the one woman for whom I would have sinned any sin, have done any folly, have given up place and name, and honour, and all I had, if she had wished. No one loves twice like that. Many never love so once. I do not pretend that life with her has been all I hoped for: those exquisite dreams are never realised; human nature does not hold the possibility of their realisation. I disappoint her perhaps as much as she chills me; it is inevitable, and is no one's fault that I know of; the fault lies with human nature.'

He paused. Damaris stood where she had been before, but the light had died down from the wood-fire, and the shadows of the twilight were upon her face. Her open-air, bird-like, flower-like life upon the island had made all life seem very simple to her, a thing regulated like the coming and going of the boats between the shores, broad and plain as the smooth sea sand of the mainland. All suddenly she saw that it was a thing of intricate mysteries, of cruel perplexities, of fathomless emotions, with whose disquietude and disillusion the learned played as with knotted threads which it amused them to disentangle, but before whose impenetrable secret the simple broke their heart.

Othmar continued with an effort, leaning against the side of the shut casement grown dark with the descending gloom of coming night.

'I cannot make you comprehend, my dear, with how great a passion I have loved her. You may have heard of one who bore my name before her, one who died on your own shores. She was lovely in body and soul, and had no fault that ever I saw, and would have died for me—did die for me, perchance—and to her I was without any love, always because my whole soul was set upon another woman. And that other is now my wife. And her, I tell you, I have loved in such wise that I believe no other love worthy the name will ever arise in me again. I do not say that it is impossible, for no man knows;—but so I think. She has disdained the place she took, and has left it empty, but no other can fill it after her. She has made that impossible——'

The tears rose to his eyes as he spoke. He could not think of the woman he had worshipped, and whose heart he thought had never had one pulse of actual love for him, without a pain which overmastered him. He had never spoken of all he felt for her to any living being throughout the years in which her influence had reigned over his life.

Damaris looked at him in the deepening shadows which hid her own face. A passionate pain communicated itself to her as she listened.

'Is it she who does not care, then?' she asked. Her voice was hurried and had a tremor in it.

'God knows!' said Othmar. 'No; I think she does not.'

He sighed wearily; his reserve once broken through, it was a kind of solace to him to speak out aloud the disappointment mute for so long, for so long unconfessed even to himself.

'It is not her fault,' he continued; 'nature made her so. We all seem to her weak and sensual fools. Her own mind is so cultured and so hypercritical that men far greater than I am would seem to her poor creatures. She needed a CÆsar to share his empire with her, and she would have laughed even at him because his laurels could not have covered his scanty locks! She would have always seen his baldness, never his greatness. She is made like that. She does not care; why should she? We care for her. But that is no reason. Perhaps she would regret it if the children she has had by me died, but if I died to-morrow I doubt if the world would look dark to her. It certainly would not look empty!'

He spoke bitterly, with truth and irony so intermingled in his unconsidered words, that it was far beyond the powers of his inexperienced hearer to distinguish between them; all she felt was that he was unhappy, yet that his soul was set irrevocably upon this woman who had wedded him only to torment, to elude, to disappoint, to humiliate him.

She did not know enough of men and women and their passions to understand all that he meant in all its fulness of mortification, but she could understand that he suffered with a kind of suffering for which it was impossible for anyone to console him, and which severed him from herself by a vast and cruel distance of which she became suddenly sensible as she had never been before. His presence was sweet to her with a sweetness which was akin to anguish; the sound of his voice thrilled through all her being, the touch of his hand was a magnetism over her, charming her to a sense of ecstasy in which she lost all power of will: but she was powerless to banish for an hour the remembrance of this other woman, she had no sorcery which could undo and replace the magic of the past; she did not think this or feel this because her thoughts and her feelings were all confused and inarticulate, but it was so, and an immense consciousness of loneliness and impotency weighed like lead upon the warmth and the buoyancy of her soul.

She was nothing to him.

They were alike silent, standing in the dusky windows with the cold dark country in its wintry silences stretched without.

'It is best she should know!' he thought with a sense of cruelty and ingratitude. It seemed to him terrible that she should waste all the treasures of her lovely youth, of her fresh emotions, of her original thoughts, of her awaking passions, upon one who could not give her even one single heart's beat of love in answer. He stooped and kissed her on her shining curls.

'Good-night, my child,' he said with pitying tenderness. 'Good-night. Think of me as your friend, always your friend, and if you see me seldom believe that it is not due to want of sympathy, but only because—because——'

He paused, seeking for words which could render his meaning clear to her without wounding her by too plain and blunt a warning against her own heart.

'Because I meet you too late to be able to care for you,' he thought; 'because I have nothing to give you worth your dreams and your youth; because I would give you more if I could, but I cannot; because my heart is like a shut grave, it is too full of its own dead to be able to let in the living!'

But he could not say this, it would have been too harsh; so he said nothing. He kissed her once more on her soft thick hair gently and coldly, and left her, while the darkness of the night gathered around her, and over the silent fields the last snow of the winter began to fall, drifting noiselessly before a northern wind.