Immediately that the dinner was over Othmar made his excuses and left Millo to take the night express to Paris. When once she knew that he was absent, she lost all fear.

Her innocent love was at that stage when the presence of a lover is full of trouble and alarm, and the happiest hours are those in which his absence permits its dreams to wander about her memory undisturbed. When he was there he was still, to her, a stranger whose gaze embarrassed her, whose touch confused her, whose association with herself was unfamiliar and unreal; but, away from him, there was nothing to check or dismay those spiritual and poetic fancies which had lodged their ideal in him. No one of those around her would ever have imagined that she had these fancies, or would have understood them in the slightest degree; they only thought that she was very naturally enraptured to be chosen by a very rich man, and did not doubt that in her mind she was musing, as Blanchette had suggested, on the colour of her liveries, the number of her horses, the places of her residence, and the prospect of her jewels.

Baron Fritz, who made her blush with the fervour of his compliments, and was so delighted with her that he could not cease from gazing at her as though she were a water-colour of Copley Fielding’s, was alone sufficiently sympathetic, despite all his seventy years of cynicism, to perceive that the things of this world had little place in her thoughts, and he thought to himself as he looked at her:

‘Will Otho be wise enough to appreciate all that? He will have the carnation in its bud, the peach in its flower; he will make just what he pleases of them; the worse will be if he should leave them altogether alone: then the carnation will unfold, the peach will ripen and come out into fruit unnoticed, and if he be an ingrate, they will both come to their perfection for someone else—which will be a pity. The child is in love with him—parbleu!—he does not deserve it; he only cares for his Russian woman, his hothouse narcissus; he only wants to cure himself of Nadine Napraxine; as if one blush of this child’s cheek were not worth a century of Madame Napraxine’s languor!’

And he felt a passing regret that he was not forty years younger and in the place of his nephew.

After dinner he seated himself beside Yseulte, and talked to her of Othmar, of his boyhood, of his talents, of his opportunities, and of his destinies, with so much tact and so much skill that she was moved to an affectionate gratitude towards the speaker and to a sense of infinite awe before all the ambitions and responsibilities with which he filled her future.

‘She is a baby, but she is not a fool,’ thought the wise old man. ‘When the love fever has passed, we shall make of her just what we want, provided only that she has influence over Otho. But will she have any? In marriage there is always one who rules the other: “un qui se baisse, et l’autre qui tend la joue”: and it is always the one who cares who goes under.’

Even as he had eaten his truffles and drunk the fine wines grown on the de Vannes’ estates in Gironde, he had been more troubled by an impersonal anxiety than he had ever allowed himself to be in the whole course of his existence. The child had sat opposite to him, looking so youthful beside the faces, more or less maquillÉes, of the women around her, with her soft surprised eyes, happy as those of a child that wakes from sleep, and her colour coming and going, delicate and warm: ‘And he will not stay here to see, just because the desire for another woman is in him like a fly in the ear of a horse!’ had thought the Baron impatiently. He guessed very accurately that the departure of Othmar was due to a restless unwillingness to face the fate which he had voluntarily made for himself.

He himself had had no heed of Othmar’s marriage except as a means of legally continuing his race; his only notion of a woman was Napoleon’s, that she should bear many children; but as he looked at Yseulte de Valogne, something kinder and more pitiful stirred in his selfish old heart; she seemed to him too good to be sacrificed so; he understood that there would be other things than money and children which this sensitive plant would want; and worldly, unemotional, and unprincipled as he was, Baron Fritz was the only person present who divined something of the dreams which she was dreaming and felt a compassionate regret for them, as for flowers which opened at dawn to die perforce at noonday.

About eleven o’clock in the evening, when Yseulte was beginning to feel her eyelids grow heavy, and was thinking wistfully of her little white bed amidst the murmur of conversation unintelligible to her and the stare of inquisitive eyes, she heard with a little thrill of an emotion quite new to her the voice of the groom of the chambers, which announced Madame la Princesse Napraxine.

Jealousy she was too young, too simple, and too innocent to know; but a strange eagerness and an unanalysed pain moved her as she saw the woman whom they said that Othmar loved.

‘Is that really Madame Napraxine?’ she said in a low voice to the Baron, who was beside her.

‘Who has told you of Madame Napraxine?’ he thought, as he answered her: ‘Yes! that is the name of the lady coming in now; she is a famous European beauty, though to my taste she is too slender and too pale.’

The girl did not reply; her eyes followed the trail of Princess Nadine’s pale primrose-coloured skirts laden with lace, and fastened here and there with large lilies and lilac. Before that inimitable grace, that exquisite languor and ease, that indescribable air of indifference and of empire and of disdain which made the peculiar power of Nadine Napraxine, the poor child felt her own insignificance, her own childishness, her own powerlessness; she fancied she must look rustic, awkward, stupid: she grew very pale, and her throat swelled with pain under her lover’s pearls.

‘It is too early for you to have that adder in your breast,’ thought Friederich Othmar, as he watched her. ‘What a coward he was to go away, instead of standing his ground beside you! After all, why is everyone so afraid of this Russian woman?’

Aloud, he only said: ‘The Princess is coming to you; courage, mon enfant. A woman of the world is certainly an alarming animal, but you will have to meet many such, and you will be one yourself before very long.’

‘Fillette, come and be presented to Mme. Napraxine; she wishes it,’ said her cousin at that moment in her ear. The girl shrank back a little, and the colour came into her face; she rose, nevertheless, obediently.

Nadine Napraxine came half-way to meet her, with an indulgent little smile, of which the compassion and disdain penetrated the inmost soul of Yseulte with a cruel sense of inferiority. Yet had she not been so humble and so embarrassed she might have seen a look of surprise in the eyes of her rival. Nadine saw at a glance that in this child there was no ‘Sainte Mousseline’ to be easily derided and contemned.

‘How beautiful a woman she will be in a year or two!’ she thought, with that candour which was never lacking in her in her judgments of her greatest foes. ‘He is going to possess all that, and he only sighs in his soul for me!—what fools men are!’

While she so thought, she was still smiling as she came to meet Yseulte with that slow, soft, indescribable grace of which she had the secret.

‘I am an old friend of Count Othmar’s; you must let me be yours in the future,’ she said with gracious kindliness. ‘Shall I offend you if I venture to say that I am sure he is a very happy and fortunate person? I dare say I shall please you better if I say that he deserves to be so.’

The girl could not have found words to answer to save her life. Instinctively she made her grand eighteenth-century curtsy in acknowledgment. She was very pale; her heart seemed to sink within her as she realised all the charm of this her rival.

Mme. de Vannes murmured a few amiable words, and left them opposite to one another; the girl trembled despite herself, as those indolent lustrous eyes scanned her with merciless investigation and smiled at her embarrassment.

It was her first experience of that obligation, so constant in the world, to meet what is dreaded and disliked with suavity and compliment.

‘I am a great friend of your cousin, too,’ continued Nadine Napraxine, with all the amiable condescension of a woman of the world to a child. ‘We shall be sure to meet constantly in the years to come, which will leave you so young and make us so old! Where have you lived? In an old Breton convent? I wish I had lived in a Breton convent too! Come and sit by me and talk to me a little. Do you know that I am here to-night on purpose to see you. I had a tiresome dinner, all of Russian people, or I should have come here earlier.’

She drew the girl down beside her on a sofa with that pretty imperiousness of which women as well as men often felt the charm and the command. She was most kindly, most gentle, most flattering, yet Yseulte suffered under all her gracious compliments as under the most poignant irony. She answered in monosyllables and at random; she was ill at ease and confused, she looked down with the fascination of a bird gazing at a snake on the hand which held hers, such a slender hand in its tan-coloured glove and with its circles of porte-bonheurs above the wrist, and its heavy bracelets crowding one another almost to the elbow.

She would not have spoken more than Yes or No to save her life, and she said even these in the wrong places; but Nadine Napraxine did not make the mistake of thinking her stupid, as less intelligent women would have done.

She studied her curiously whilst she continued to speak those amiable and careless nothings which are the armoury of social life; toy weapons of which the young know neither the use nor the infinite value. She had all the kindly condescension, the good-humoured, amused indulgence, of a grown woman of the world for a schoolgirl; by dates she was only seven years older than Yseulte de Valogne, but in experience and knowledge she was fifty years her senior.

‘Elle est vraiment trÈs bien,’ she said, as she turned away from the girl and took the arm of Friederich Othmar. ‘At present she is like a statue in the clay, like a sketch, like a magnolia flower folded up; but Othmar will change all that. You must be so glad; his marriage must have been such an anxiety to you. Suppose he had married a Mongol! What would you have done?’

‘It was not precisely of the Mongol that I was most afraid, Madame,’ replied the Baron. ‘ Do you think too that a marriage is a termination to anyone’s anxieties? Surely, the dangerous romance begins afterwards in life as in novels.’

‘It would be very dull reading in either if it did not,’ said Madame Napraxine. ‘But we will hope that Mademoiselle and your nephew will read theirs together, and eschew the dangers; that is possible sometimes; and she will have one great advantage for the next five years; she will be handsomer every year.’

‘It will be a great advantage if he find her so, but perhaps only others will find her so; marriage does not lend rose-coloured spectacles to its disciples,’ thought the Baron, as he answered aloud, ‘There can be no one’s opinion that he could value as much as he is sure to do that of Madame Napraxine.’

‘I imagine my opinion matters nothing at all to him,’ she answered, with her enigmatical smile. ‘But when I see him I shall certainly be able to congratulate him with much more truth than one can usually put into those conventionalities. Mademoiselle de Valogne is very beautiful.’

The Baron sadly recalled the saying of that wise man who was of opinion that it makes little difference after three months whether your wife be a Venus or a Hottentot; but he did not utter this blasphemy to a lovely woman.

The girl remained on her sofa gazing wistfully after this ÉlÉgante who had all the knowledge which she lacked, and who impressed her so sadly with an indefinite dull sense of inferiority and of helplessness. She put her hand up to her throat and felt for his pearls; they seemed like friends; they seemed to assure her of his affection and of the future. People thought she was proud of them because they were so large, so perfect in colour and shape, so royal in their value; she would have been as pleased with them if they had been strings of berries out of the woods, and he had sent them with the same message and meaning.

She watched Nadine Napraxine with fascinated eyes; wondering where was the secret of that supreme seduction which even she, in her convent-bred simplicity, could feel was in her. In the few words which had been addressed to her she was dimly conscious that the other disdained her as a child, and derided Othmar as a fool.

Madame de Vannes roused her from her preoccupation with a tap of her fan.

‘How grave you look, fillette,’ she said with some impatience. ‘You must never look like that now you are in the world. Everyone detests grave people. If you cannot always smile, stay in your convent.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ murmured Yseulte, waking from her meditation with a little shock. ‘I did not know—I was thinking——’

‘That is just what you must not do when you are in society. What were you thinking of? You looked very sombre.’

The girl coloured and hesitated, then she said very low:

‘The other day—the day of the casket—you said he loved her—was it true?’

She glanced across the room at Nadine Napraxine as she spoke.

‘Did I say so?’ answered the Duchesse, with annoyance at herself. ‘Then I talked great nonsense. But how was I to know then that he was thinking of you? Listen to me, fillette,’ she continued, with more real kindness in her tone than the girl had ever heard there. ‘ You will hear all kinds of scandals, insinuations, stories of all sorts in the world that you will live in; never listen to them, or you will be perpetually irritated and unhappy. People say all sorts of untruths out of sheer idleness; they must talk. M. Othmar must certainly have some very especial esteem for you, or why should he choose you out of all womankind for his wife? That is all you have to think of; do not perplex yourself as to whom he may, or may not, have loved beforehand. All your care must be that he shall love no one else afterwards. You are tired, I think; go to bed, if you like: you can slip away unnoticed. You are only a child yet.’

Yseulte went at once, thankful for the permission, yet looking wistfully still at the delicate head of Nadine Napraxine, as it rose up from a collar of emeralds. Madame de Vannes passed to the music room, where a little operetta was being given, with a vague compassion stirring in her.

‘I am sure the old Marquise could not have given her more moral advice than I,’ she thought, ‘but I am afraid the silly child will have trouble, she is so old-fashioned. Why cannot she marry the man, and enjoy all he will give her, without perplexing herself as to what fancies he may have had for other people? What does it matter? She will have to get used to that sort of thing. If it be not Nadine who makes her jealous, it will be someone else; but one could not tell her that. How right I was not to send Blanchette and Toinon to a convent! The holy women make them so romantic, so emotional, so pleurnicheuses!’

At the same moment Nadine Napraxine said, when she had left her and was speaking to Melville of her:

‘She is very interesting. She will have plenty of character; he thinks that he is marrying a child; he forgets that she will grow up, and that very rapidly. Marriage is a hothouse for women who are young. I was married at her age; in three months’ time I felt as old—as old—as old as I do now. Nobody can feel older! You are sixty-five, you say, and you are so young. That is because you are not married and can believe in Paradise.’

‘You mean that I hope for compensation?’ said Melville, with his pleasant laugh.

‘Or that you keep your illusions. There is so much in that. People who do are always young. I do not think I ever had any to lose!’

‘It is great emotions which make happy illusions, and I believe you have never permitted those to approach you?’

‘I have viewed them from afar off, as Lucretius says one ought to see a storm.’

‘I do not doubt you have seen them very often, Princess,’ said Melville, with significance. ‘But as you have not shared them, they have passed by you like great waves which leave no mark upon the smoothness of the sand on which they break.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, while her mind reverted to the scene of which her boudoir had been the theatre three days before; then she added a little abruptly: ‘You know Mlle. de Valogne well—you are interested in her? What do you think of her marriage?’

‘I have known her from the time she was four years old,’ replied Melville. ‘I have seen her at intervals at the convent of FaÏel. I am convinced she has no common character; she is very unlike the young girls one sees in the world, who have had their course of Deauville, Aix, and Biarritz. She is of the antique French patrician type; perhaps the highest human type that the world has ever seen, and the most capable of self-restraint, of heroism, of true distinction, and of loyalty. I fancy Elizabeth de France must have been just such a girl as is Yseulte de Valogne.’

‘What eulogy!’ returned his companion, with a little incredulous accent. ‘I have always wondered that your Church did not canonize the Princess Elizabeth. But you do not tell me what you think of the marriage.’

Melville smiled.

‘I might venture to prophecy if the success of a marriage depended on two persons, but it depends on so many others.’

‘You are very mysterious; I do not see what others have to do with it.’

‘And yet,’ thought Melville, ‘how often you have stretched out your delicate fingers and pushed down the most finely-wrought web of human happiness—just for pastime!’

Aloud he said: ‘If she and he were about to live their lives on a desert island, I am convinced they would be entirely suited to each other. But as they will live in the world, and perforce in what they call the great world, who shall presume to say what their marriage will become? It may pass into that indifferent and amiable friendship which is the most usual issue of such marriages, or it may grow into that direct antagonism which is perhaps its still commoner result; on the other hand, it may become that perfect flower of human sympathy which, like the aloe, blossoms once in a century; but, if that miracle happen, such flowers are not immortal; an unkind grasp will suffice to break them off at the root. On the whole, I am not especially hopeful; she is too young, and he——’

‘And he?’ said Nadine Napraxine, with a gleam of curiosity in her glance.

‘I am not his confessor; I doubt if he ever confess—to his own sex,’ replied Melville; ‘but if I had been, I should have said to him: “My son, one does not cure strong fevers with meadow-daisies; wait till your soul is cleansed before you offer it to a child whom you take from God.” That is what I should have said in the confessional; but I only know Othmar on the neutral ground of society. I cannot presume to say it there.’

‘You are too serious, Monsignore,’ said Nadine, with her enigmatical smile. ‘Marriage is not such a very serious thing, I assure you. Ask Platon.’

‘Prince Napraxine is exceptionally happy,’ said Melville, so gravely that she laughed gaily in his face.

Meanwhile Yseulte dismissed the maid, undressed herself slowly, kissed the pearls when she had unclasped them; and, kneeling down under her crucifix, said many prayers for Othmar.

She was soon asleep, like a tired child, and she had his note under her pillow; nevertheless, she dreamed of Nadine Napraxine, and her sleep was not the pure unbroken rest that she had always had before. Once she awoke in a great terror, her heart beating, her limbs trembling.

‘If he did not love me!’ she cried aloud; then the light of the lamp fell on the open casket, on the necklace of pearls. They seemed to say to her, ‘What should he want with you, unless he loved you?’

She fell asleep again, and with a smile on her face.