With October days an accident as her boat crossed the Loire water, when the autumn currents were rolling strong and wide, brought on the premature delivery of a child, who barely breathed for a few moments, and then took with him into darkness the hopes of the Maison d’Othmar. The fury and the grief of Friederich Othmar were so great that they far surpassed the moderate regret shown by his nephew, who appeared to him intolerably cold and little moved save by his sympathy with the sorrow of the child’s young mother.

‘You would care, I believe, nothing if there were no one to succeed you when you die!’ said the elder man with indignation.

Othmar gave a gesture of indifference.

‘I hope I should care for my sons as much as most men care for theirs,’ he replied. ‘But the “succession” does not seem to me to be of vital importance. If you would only believe it, we are not Hohenzollerns nor Guelfs, and even they would be easily replaced, though perhaps Moltke or Wolseley would not be so.’

‘Why do I, indeed, care so little?’ said Othmar to himself when he was alone. ‘I am neither inhuman nor heartless. I used to be quickly touched to any kind of feeling; but the whole of life seems cold to me, and profitless. I was dry-eyed whilst that poor child wept over that little, frail, waxen body which was so much to her; would have been so much to her if it had lived to lie on her breast. It is the most pathetic of all possible things—a girl still sixteen sorrowing for her offspring which has perished before it had any separate existence; has died before it lived; and yet, I feel hardly more than if I had seen a bird flying round an empty nest, or a brood of leverets wailing in an empty form. I think she took my heart out of my chest that day she fooled me, and put a stone there——’

He meant Nadine Napraxine, who remained the one woman on the earth for him.

A woman of unstable impulses, of incalculable caprices, of an infinite intelligence, of as infinite an egotism; absorbed in herself, save so far as her merciless eyes scanned the whole world as players, whilst her fastidious taste found them the poorest players, and judged them inexorably as dunces and as fools; a woman who had treated the tragedy of his own passion as a mere comedy, and had listened to it seriously for a moment only the better to turn it into jest.

Yet the one woman upon earth whom he adored, whom he desired.

For love is fate, and will neither be commanded nor gainsaid.

THE END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.