The first days of February came all too soon for the vague fears of Yseulte, which throbbed in her as the heart beats in a bird which feels a captor’s hand approaching. All the ridicule of Blanchette and Toinon, all the good-natured banter of their mother, and all the endless congratulations of society which rained on her like the almond blossoms which were falling in showers in the wind, could not make her otherwise than bewildered and alarmed, and as the time of her marriage drew closer and closer her terror almost obscured her happiness. No one would have believed in it; everyone, had they known the secrets of her shy and silent mind, would have laughed at it as hypocrisy; but with her it was most real.

Away from Othmar, she adored him; but near him, she dreaded him as a stranger who was about to lead her into the strangest and most terrible mysteries of life. But time stays not for the sinking or the fluttering of any poor human heart, and they brought her from the dim, cold, misty Breton country back into the gay and crowded world of Paris; and the great rooms of her cousin’s house, filled by brilliant throngs for the signing of the contract, brought home to her the inexorable fact that her marriage would itself take place in another forty-eight hours.

‘You are so pale, fillette!’ said the Duchesse in some impatience. ‘One would think that we were forcing your inclinations!’

Yseulte said nothing; she could not have explained the tumult of agitation which was in her. She was marvellously happy; and yet——

A lover who had loved her would have divined and penetrated all those mingled emotions, which were unintelligible to herself; but Othmar was too distrait and too absorbed in thought, wherein she had no share, to do so. Though she was the centre of the world around her for the moment, the child remained in an absolute solitude.

Friederich Othmar, studying her with his exquisite power of penetration, alone perceived her trouble, and thought with pleasure: ‘The poets are not quite the fools I deemed them; there is such a thing as a virginal soul in which the senses do not speak, and to which the gewgaws of the world say nothing either. I should never have believed that, but I see it. He has found a pearl, but he will not care for it. He will absorb it into the acid of his own disappointed passions, and then will be surprised if it disappear.’

If he had been told a month earlier that he would have had such sentimental regrets, he would have been wholly incredulous, but something in the sight of the young girl, in her innocent gravity, with her wistful, changeful eyes, touched him, as she stood by the table where the marriage contract was signed. She seemed to him too good to be wedded with indifference, taught the fever of passion, the suffering of maternity, and then be forsaken—as she would be.

‘I am glad that I did not meet her, or one like her, thirty years ago; she would have unnerved me,’ he thought, as he stooped and wrote his own name.

Amongst the nuptial gifts had been one of great value from the Princess Napraxine. It was a gold statuette of Love, modelled by MerciÉ and standing on a base of jade and agate. It had all the cruelty and irony of the modern Italian school in it, for the poor Amorino was trying to drink out of a gourd which was empty, and the expression of his disappointed, distressed, pathetic features was rendered with admirable mockery and skill. He turned his sad eyes ruefully on those who looked at him; some withered passion-flowers and a little asp were near his feet. When Othmar saw it, his face darkened; he thought it a jest at himself, nor had the giver selected it without intention. Behind the gold Amorino he seemed to see her smiling, serene, jewel-like eyes, her delicate, contemptuous mouth, which said: ‘Va donc! C’est le vieux jeu!’

‘The only woman that I shall ever love!’ he thought with a thrill of remorse, of shame, and of anger, all in one.

What right had he, while his veins were hot with those unholy fires, to simulate love for an innocent and virgin life?

The morning came for which Blanchette and Toinon had been longing for a month; and clothed in palest blue velvet, carrying white bouquets as large as themselves, they wore at their throats the new diamond lockets of their ambition, with the miniature of their cousin within each, for which they cared nothing at all. But the diamonds were as large and as numerous as ever their hearts could desire. ‘Vrai! Il est bon prince!’ they cried in chorus, as they skipped round each other, and made the sun sparkle in the jewels, and sang the song of Judic.

Then they went to the church of S. Philippe du Roule, and made their little naughty faces as grave as mice that see a cat, while the incense rose and the organ pealed, and the Latin words rolled out sonorously, and the pale wintry sunshine shone over the brilliant crowd assembled there for the marriage.

Yseulte herself looked like a slender white lily.

The deep peace and serenity of her convent days had come there with her; certain instincts of her race kept her still and composed with the eyes of so many strangers upon her; a dignity that was exquisitely graceful blended with her childish air; she looked like some young princess of the Valois time, such as poets and painters still see in their dreams.

One of those special trains which Blanchette thought the supreme privilege of marriage bore them without a pause through the wintry landscapes between Paris and Blois.

The day was fine and windless; there was a scent of spring which breathed through the leafless poplars and willows, and over the frosted fields and vineyards, with sweet, vague promise; here and there burst in to sight, out from a forest glade beside some chÂteau, some gaily-clad hunting party, the last of the season; ever and anon there was some little town, with its old ruined castle, or its monastic church, shut in, in leafless orchards. The broad river glistened in the light under the burden of its many islands, its breaking blocks of ice drifting on turbid green waters, its flood of mud and melted snow rolling heavily beneath the colliers and the merchant craft, which made their way slowly against the floes. In the drear blackened vineyards, peasants, like pictures by Millet, were at work; sometimes a woman with faggots on her bowed shoulders straightened herself to watch the swiftness of the train, or a bluefrocked herd-boy stopped his cattle at a crossing.

All these pictures passed before the eyes of Yseulte like the panorama of a dream: the early morning hours had been one long bewilderment to her; though she had carried herself so bravely, her heart had beaten all the while like a caught bird’s: even now the scent of the incense, the waves of sound from the organ, the sonorous voice of the great prelate in its admonitions, seemed to come with her into the still, brown, fresh country; the sense of some infinite and solemn obligation, accepted and irrevocable, was upon her.

They had left Paris immediately after the ceremony; and the evening sun was glowing in the west and lighting the pastoral country with its leafless woods and glancing rivers as they reached the chÂteau.

AmyÔt was a place of great beauty and stateliness; it had been built for FranÇois Premier, and had the salamander and the crown carved on its stones and blazoned on its metal work; it was surrounded by water like Chenonceaux, and in the sunset-glow its pinnacles and towers and high steep roof gleamed as if made of gold; it stood on a hill amidst great woods, overlooking the fruitful valleys and fertile plains which lie between the Loire and Cher, and in its gardens all the art that modern horticulture can boast was united to the stately avenues, the close-shorn turf, the long grey stone terraces with the motto of the Valois and the fleur-de-lis of France carved upon their pilasters, which had in their day seen the mignons of Henri II., and felt the feet of Diane de Poitiers and of Mary Stuart.

AmyÔt was a poem, epic and epopee in one; she had never seen it before; she gazed at it with entranced eyes, glad that her home would be in such a place; then she looked timidly at Othmar.

He was not looking at her.

She sighed, hardly knowing why, but with a vague sense of neglect and disappointment. She was in a trance of mingled joy and dread. She saw the dusky avenue of yews through which they passed, the long lines of majestic terraces, the sheets of glancing water, the masses of camellias and azaleas, brought from the hothouses to make the wintry gardens bloom for that momentous hour, the vast fantastic solemn pile towering up against the evening skies. She saw them all as in a dream; she was wondering wistfully in her ignorance whether it were possible that she had offended him, or possible that already he regretted what he had done. She shrank a little from him, and sat quite silent as their carriage rolled under the great stone gateway.

There had been enough in his caresses, in his words, as they had come thither, to startle her innocent ignorance into some sense of the meaning and the demands of love, but they had left her dimly alarmed and troubled, as before some great mystery, and he had soon grown abstracted, almost indifferent, and had abandoned himself to his own thoughts.

AmyÔt even in its winter silence and sombreness, was a place where lovers could well forget the world; yews and bay trees made perpetual verdure around its lawns, and orangeries and palm-houses made ceaseless summer within its walls; in its halls and galleries old tapestries and Eastern hangings muffled every sound and excluded every draught; and in the warm air of its chambers, ceiled with cedar-wood, embossed with the salamander, and the ‘F.’ in solid gold, and having embayed windows, all looking straightway south over the Loire water, the winter’s landscape, seen through its painted casements, was but as a decorative scene set there for the strong charm of contrast.

They passed through the ranks of the bowing servants, and remained at last alone in the great suite of drawing-rooms, whose oriel windows all looked southward. They were rooms hung with pale satins, still ceiled with cedar, and keeping the Valois crown and arms upon their gilded carvings and lofty archways. They preserved the style and charm of the age which had begotten them. She was in harmony with them as she moved there, the dull red light which preceded evening falling through the painted panes on the dove-hued velvet and dusky furs of her travelling-gown, and touching the light gold of her fair hair coiled in a great knot above her throat.

He, when his servants had retired, kissed her hand with a ceremony which seemed, even to her innocence, very cold.

‘You are at home,’ he said gently. ‘Here it will be for you to command, for all to obey.’

She stood before him in one of the embrasures of the windows; the cream-hued velvet of her travelling-dress trimmed with sable, caught the rays of the setting sun.

‘You are chÂtelaine of AmyÔt,’ he added, with a smile. ‘Here I shall be but the first of your servants.’

The words were gracious, and even tender, but they touched her with a sense of chillness; she felt, without knowing why she felt it, that it was not with this courteous ceremony that he would have welcomed her if he had loved her—much.

She said nothing, though she coloured a little as he kissed her hands.

She moved to one of the great windows and looked out a little wistfully towards the rolling waters, the deep, dark brown forests with their purple shadows. The dim afternoon light spread over the landscape without, and through the gorgeous and majestic chambers, which had once heard the love words of the Valois. She had laid her hat down on a table near, the lingering glow of the dying day fell on her white throat, on her cheek with its changing colour, on the knot of orange blossom fastened amongst the lace at her breast; she thrilled through all her nerves as she suddenly realised that she was altogether his, to be used as he chose, never to be apart from him unless by his wish.

She gazed at the scene around her, troubled, perplexed, wistfully, vaguely alarmed, afraid she knew not of what; whilst he watched her with a certain futile anger against himself that her loveliness did not excite him and content him more, a remorseful sense that he was not the lover she merited and should have won.

A sort of self-reproach moved him as he looked at her in her innocence, which seemed too holy a thing to be profaned by the grossness of sensual approach—on the morrow she would not look at him with those serene, childlike eyes.

It seemed to him almost cruel to rouse that perfect innocence from its unsuspicious repose.

Before he could speak again she had turned towards him; her lips trembled a little as she gathered her courage and said aloud what had been in her thoughts all the day through.

‘It will be for me to obey,’ she murmured, with the colour deepening in her cheeks. ‘And I will do it always, so gladly: but would you tell me one thing: did you—I mean—if you had not cared for me a little, surely you would never have wished——?’

She paused, overcome by the sense of her own hardihood, and her eyes filled with tears; she longed to say to him, ‘Instead of all your jewels, instead of all this luxury, give me one fond word,’ but her timidity and her modesty would not let her lips frame the supplication. He was still as a stranger to her—a man whom she had seen scarce a dozen times.

The question in its timid commencement had said enough: his conscience shrank from it; he had always dreaded the moment inevitable of the fatal—

‘Would you tell me?’ she repeated very low, then paused with an overwhelming sense of her own hardihood and great immodesty.

She made a beautiful picture as she stood before him; the cream-hued satin falling about her, the warm cedar-wood panels behind her, the red light of the sunset shed like a glory upon her head and shining about her feet.

‘Who would not love you, dear?’ he murmured, with a hesitation of which her own confusion spared her from being conscious. ‘Never doubt my affection. I have not been as happy as the world thinks me, but if I be not happy beside you, fate will indeed find me thankless.’

Nor was it altogether untrue; she looked infinitely lovely to him in that moment, with the tears shining in her upraised eyes, and the blue veins of her throat swelling where the orange flowers touched them; and all this was his—his as wholly as the budding primrose in the woods is the child’s that finds it and may pluck and rifle it at will.

An emotion that was more nearly passion than he had hitherto felt for her moved him as he looked on her.

With a sudden impulse of the joy and mastery of possession, warmer and more eager than any she had roused in him before, he took her in his arms and kissed her throat where the orange flowers were fastened, and, with a tender touch, unloosed them.