Othmar, as he left La Jacquemerille, forgot the boat in which he had come thither. He walked mechanically through the house, and out by the first gate which he saw before him. He was in that state of febrile excitation in which the limbs move without the will in an instinctive effort to find outlet to mental pain in bodily exertion. The gate he had passed through opened into a little wood of pines, whence a narrow path led upward into the hills above. With little consciousness of what he did, he ascended the mule-road which rose before him, and the chill of the morning air, as it blew through the tops of the swaying pines, was welcome to him. He had that cruel wound within him which a proud man suffers from when he has disclosed the innermost secrets of his heart in a rare moment of impulse, and has seen them lightly and contemptuously played with for a jest.

He had gone through life receiving much adulation but little sympathy, and giving as little confidence; in a moral isolation due to the delicacy of his own nature and to the flattery he received, which had early made him withhold himself from intimate friendships, fearing to trust where he would be only duped.

To her, in an unguarded hour, he had shown the loneliness and the longing which he felt, he had disclosed the empty place which no powers or vanities of the world could fill; he had staked the whole of his peace on the caprice of one woman, and he knew that, in the rough phrase which men would have used to him, he had been made a fool of in return; he had betrayed himself, and had nothing in return but the memory of a little low laughter, of a tranquil voice, saying: ‘Tout cela c’est le vieux jeu!’

He never knew very well how that day of the 2nd of January passed with him. He was sensible of walking long, of climbing steep paths going towards the higher mountains, of drinking thirstily at a little woodland fountain, of sitting for hours quite motionless, looking down on the shore far below, where the blue sea spread in the sunlight, and the towers of S. Pharamond were mere grey points amidst a crowd of evergreen and of silvery-leafed trees.

There was an irony in the sense that he could have purchased the whole province which lay beneath his feet, could have bought out the princeling who reigned in that little kingdom under old Turbia, as easily as he could have bought a bouquet for a woman, could have set emperors to war with one another by merely casting his gold into the scales of peace, could have created a city in a barren plain with as little effort as a child builds up a toy village on a table, and yet was powerless to command, or to arouse, the only thing on earth which he desired, one whit of feeling in the woman he loved!

It was late in the afternoon when he took his way homeward, having eaten nothing, only drunk thirstily of water wherever a little brook had made a well amongst the tufts of hepatica in the pine woods. He was a man capable of a spiritual love; if she had remained aloof from him for honour’s sake, but had cared for him, he would not have demurred to her choice, but would have accepted his fate at her hands and would have served her loyally with the devotion of a chivalrous nature.

All the passion, the pain, as of a boy’s first love, blent in him with the bitter revolts of mature manhood. He believed that Nadine Napraxine had never intended more than to amuse herself with his rejection; he believed that for the second time he had been the toy of an unscrupulous coquette. Whatever fault there might be in his love for her, it was love—absolute, strong, faithful, and capable of an eternal loyalty; he had laid his heart bare before her, and had meant in their utmost meaning all the words which he had uttered, all the offers which he had made. Despite his knowledge of her, he had allowed himself to be beguiled into a second confession of the empire she possessed over him, and for the second time he had been not alone rejected, but gently ridiculed with that quiet amused irony which had been to the force and heat of his passion like a fine spray of ice-cold water falling on iron at a white-heat. She had not alone wounded and stung him: she had humiliated him profoundly. If she had rejected him from honour, duty, or love for any other, he would have borne what men have borne a thousand times in silence, and with no sense of shame; but he was conscious that in her absolute indifference she had drawn him on to the fullest revelation of all he felt for her, only that her ready satire might find food in his folly, and her fine wit play with his suffering, as the angler plays the trout. She seemed to him to have betrayed him in the basest manner that a woman could betray a man who had no positive right to her loyalty. She had known so well how he loved her. He had told her so many times; unless she had been willing to hear the tale again, why had she bidden him come there in that charmed solitude in the hush and freshness of the early morning? When women desire not love, do they seat their lover beside them when all the world sleeps? He had been cheated, laughed at, summoned, and then dismissed; his whole frame thrilled with humiliation when he recalled the smiling subdued mockery of her voice as she had dismissed him.

He had been willing to give her his life, his good repute, his peace, his honour, his very soul; and she had sent him away with the calm, cool, little phrases with which she would have rejected a clumsy valser for a cotillon!

He had little vanity, but he knew himself to be one of those to whom the world cringes; one of those of whom modern life has made its CÆsars; he knew that what he had been willing to surrender to her had been no little thing; that he would have said farewell to the whole of mankind for her sake, and would have loved her with the romantic devoted force and fealty of a franker and fiercer time than his own; and she had drawn him on to again confess this, again offer this, and all it had seemed to her was vieux jeu, an archaic thing to laugh at, to yawn at, to be indulgent to, and tired by, in a breath!

He was a very proud man, and a man who had seldom or never shown what he either desired or suffered, yet he had laid his whole heart bare to her; and she, the only living being who had either power over him, or real knowledge of him, had looked at him with her little cool smile, and said, ‘In three months I should be tired of you.’

If, when the knight had killed his falcon for his lady, she had scoffed at it and thrown it out to feed the rats and sparrows he would have suffered as Othmar suffered now. He had killed his honour and his pride for her sake, and she had held them in her hands for a moment, and then had laughed a little and had thrown them away.

Where he sat all alone he felt his cheeks burn with the sense of an unendurable mortification. At this moment, for aught he knew, she, with her admirable mimicry and her merciless sarcasm, might be reacting the scene for the diversion of her companions! Passion was but vieux jeu; it could expect no higher distinction than to be ridiculed as comedy by a witty woman. Did not the universe only exist to amuse the languor of Nadine Napraxine?

The world, had it heard the story, would have blamed him for an unholy love, and praised her for her dismissal of it; but he knew that he had been as utterly betrayed as though he had been sold by her into the hands of assassins. She had drawn him on, and on, and on, until all his life had been laid at her feet, and then she had looked at it a little, carelessly, idly, and had said she had no use for it, as she might have said so of any sea-waste washed up on the sea-steps of her terrace with that noon.

Of course the world would have praised her; no doubt the world would have blamed him; but he knew that women who slay their lovers after loving them do a coarser but a kinder thing.

It was almost dark as he descended the road to S. Pharamond, intending when he reached home to make some excuse to his uncle and leave for Paris by the night express or by a special train. The path he took led through the orange-wood of Sandroz, which fitted, in a triangular-shaped piece of ground, between the boundaries of his own land and that of Millo. Absorbed as he was in his own thoughts, he recognised with surprise the figure of Yseulte as he pushed his way under the low boughs of the orange trees, and saw her within a yard of him. She was with the woman Nicole.

She did not see him until he was close to her, where she sat on a low stone wall, the woman standing in front of her. When she did so, her face spoke for her; it said what Nadine Napraxine’s had never said. The emotion of joy and timidity mingled touched him keenly in that moment, when he, with his millions of gold and of friends, had so strongly realised his own loneliness.

‘She loves me as much as she dare—as much as she can, without being conscious of it,’ he thought, as he paused beside her. She did not speak, she did not move; but her colour changed and her breath came quickly. She had slipped off the wall and stood irresolute, as though inclined to run away, the glossy leaves and the starry blossoms of the trees consecrated to virginity were all above her and around her. She glanced at him with an indefinite fear; she fancied he was angered by the return of the casket; he looked paler and sterner than she had ever seen him look.

He paused a moment and said some commonplace word.

Then he saw that her eyes were wet with tears, and that she had been crying.

‘What is the matter?’ he said, gently. ‘Has anything vexed you?’

‘They are sending her away,’ said Nicole Sandroz, with indignant tears in her own eyes, finding that she did not reply for herself. ‘They are sending her to the Vosges, where, as Monsieur knows very well, I make no doubt, the very hares and wolves are frozen in the woods at this month of the year.’

‘Are you indeed going away?’ he asked of Yseulte herself.

She did not speak: she made a little affirmative gesture.

‘Why is that? Bois le Roy, in this season, will be a cruel prison for you.’

‘My cousin wishes it,’ said the girl; she spoke with effort; she did not wish to cry before him; the memory of all that her cousin had said that morning was with her in merciless distinctness.

Nicole broke out in a torrent of speech, accusing the tyrants of Millo in impassioned and immoderate language, and devoting them and theirs to untold miseries in retribution.

Yseulte stopped her with authority; ‘You are wrong, Nicole; do not speak in such a manner, it is insolent. You forget that, whether I am in the Vosges or here, I equally owe my cousin everything.’

She paused; she was no more than a child. Her departure was very cruel to her; she had been humiliated and chastised that day beyond her power of patience; she had said nothing, done nothing, but in her heart she had rebelled passionately when they had taken away her ivory casket. They had left her the heart of a woman in its stead.

Othmar was ignorant that his casket, fateful as Pandora’s, had been returned, but he divined that his gift had displeased those who disposed of her destiny, and had brought about directly or indirectly her exile from Millo.

‘When do you go?’ he asked abruptly.

‘To-morrow.’

As she answered him the tears she could not altogether restrain rolled off her lashes. She turned away.

‘Let us go in, Nicole,’ she murmured. ‘You know Henriette is waiting for me.’

‘Let her wait, the cockered-up Parisienne, who shrieks if she see a pig and has hysterics if she get a spot of mud on her stockings!’ grumbled Nicole, who was the sworn foe of the whole Paris-born and Paris-bred household of Millo. But Yseulte had already moved towards the house. When she had gone a few yards away, however, she paused, returned, and approached Othmar. She looked on the ground, and her voice trembled as she spoke: ‘I ought to thank you, M. Othmar—I do thank you. It was very beautiful. I would have kept it all my life.’

‘Ah!’ said Othmar.

He understood; he was moved to a sudden anger, which penetrated even his intense preoccupation. He had meant to do this poor child a kindness, and he had only done her great harm.

Yseulte had turned away, and had gone rapidly through the orange-trees towards the house.

‘She is not happy?’ said Othmar to her foster-mother, whose tongue, once loosed, told him with the eloquence of indignation of all the sorrows suffered by her nursling. ‘And they will make her a nun, Monsieur!’ she cried; ‘a nun! That child, who is like a June lily. For me, I say nothing against the black and grey women, though Sandroz calls them bad names. There are good women amongst them, and when one lies sick in hospital one is glad of them; but there are women enough in this world who have sins and shame to repent them of to fill all the convents from here to Jerusalem. There are all the ugly ones too, and the sickly ones and the deformed ones, and the heart-broken; for them it is all very well; the cloister is home, the veil is peace, they must think of heaven, or go mad; it is best they should think of it. But this child to be a nun!—when she should be running with her own children through the daisies—when she should be playing in the sunshine like the lambs, like the kids, like the pigeons!’ ——

Othmar heard her to the end; then without answer he bade her good-day, and descended the sloping grass towards his house.

‘They say he has a million a year,’ said Nicole to herself, as she looked after him. ‘Well, he does not seem to be happy upon it. The lads that bring up the rags on their heads from the ships look gayer than he, all in the stench and the muck as they are, and never knowing that they will earn their bread and wine from one day to another.’

She kicked a stone from her path, and hurried after her nursling.

Othmar went quickly on to his own woods. ‘They could not even let her have that toy,’ he thought with an emotion, vague but sincere, outside the conflict of passion, wrath, and mortification which Nadine Napraxine had aroused in him. He saw the sudden happiness, so soon veiled beneath reserve and timidity, which had shone on the girl’s face as she had first seen him under the orange boughs. He saw her beautiful golden eyes misty with the tears she had had too much courage to shed; he saw her slender throat swell with subdued emotion as she had approached him and said shyly, ‘I would have kept it all my life.’

All her life,—in the stone cell of some house of the Daughters of Christ or the Sisters of St. Marie!

he thought. ‘What treasures for one’s heart and senses are in her—if one could only care!’