With the turn of the year and the springing of the crocuses her cousins had come to Millo. When she was in their presence she was more careful than at any other time that no one should see in her any pain which could be construed by them into a reproach against Othmar.

‘She grows proud and cold,’ said the Duchesse. ‘The women of her blood have always been like that—religious and austere. It is a pity. It will age her before her time; and it is not at all liked in the world nowadays—save just at Lent.’

Blanchette, with her keen mysotis-coloured eyes, saw farther than her mother saw. She did not dare to tease her cousin, or to banter her, but she looked sometimes with curiosity and wonder in her face.

One day, in a softer mood than was usual with her, she came over the gardens from Millo and found her way to her cousin. Blanchette liked to be welcome at S. Pharamond; her shrewd little senses smelt the fragrance in all wealth which dogs find in the truffle; she was always asking for things and getting them, and though she was afraid of Othmar as far as she could be of anyone, she retained amongst her respect for Yseulte’s position her derision for what she termed her romanticism, her Puritanism, and her habitual ignorance of how to extract the honey of self-indulgence from the flowers of pleasure. But Blanchette had all the wisdom of the world in her little fair, curly head, and though at times her malicious impulses conquered her judgment, she usually repressed them out of reverence for the many good gifts which fell to her from her cousin’s hands, and those instincts of ‘modernity’ which forced her to worship where so much riches were.

She came into the garden salon this day, the one where Melville had once said to Othmar that to make a home was in the power of any man not a priest. Her eyes were watchful and her manner important; but Yseulte, to whom the child’s presence was always irksome, though her gratitude to their mother forced her always to receive the little sisters with apparent willingness, had not observation enough, or thought enough of her, to notice those signs. She was alone; it was two hours after the noon breakfast; Othmar was away, she knew not where; he had gone out early in the forenoon. She was lost in the weariness of those thoughts which occupied her unceasingly, when the pretty gay figure of the child tripped up to her side, and the thin high voice of her began its endless chatter.

‘They were talking about you yesterday after the dÉjeuner,’ she said, after her discursive gossip had embraced every subject and person then of interest to her, pecking at each one of them furtively, petulantly, as a well-fed mouse pecks at crumbs of cake. ‘They were saying how beautiful you were; even mamma said that, and they all agreed that if only you were not so grave, so cold, so almost stiff, nobody would be admired more than you. But men think you do not care, so they do not care. It is true,’ added Blanchette, studying the face of her cousin out of the corner of her eye, ‘it is true that the Princess Napraxine, whom they are always so mad about, is just as indifferent too. But then it is another kind of indifference—hers. She is always provoking them with it, on purpose. You go through a room as if you were saying a paternoster under your breath. It is a great difference——’

‘It is, no doubt, a great difference,’ said Yseulte, with more bitterness than she was aware of; the idle words struck at the hidden wound within her. The difference was vast indeed between herself and the woman whom her husband loved!

Blanchette watched her sharply, herself sitting on a stool at her feet.

‘Do you know,’ she said, pulling the ears of Yseulte’s great dog, ‘that she is coming—indeed, I think, is here? I heard them say so yesterday. It seems that the Prince bought that little villa and gave it to her—La Jacquemerille—when they were here two years ago. She is very rich, you know. Her husband has left her such immense properties, and then I think she had a great deal of money all of her own, before his death, from some distant relative, who left it to her because she did not want it; it is always like that.’

Yseulte rose abruptly. Blanchette could not see her face, but she saw her left hand, which trembled.

As far as the child liked anyone, she was attached to her cousin; since her marriage Yseulte had been extremely generous and kind to her, and the selfish little heart of Blanchette had been won, as far as ever it could be won, by its affections which were only another form of selfishness. She had been unable to resist the temptation of telling her news, and saying what was unkind; and yet in her way she was compassionate.

‘Why are you so very still and grave?’ she said now after a pause. ‘They say it is because the child died, but that cannot be it; it is nonsense; you would not care like that. Do you know now what I think? Do not be angry. I think that you are so unhappy because—because—now Prince Napraxine is dead, you fancy that she would have been his wife if you had not been here!’

‘Silence!’ said Yseulte, with imperative command. Her face grew scarlet under the inquisitive, searching gaze of the child. She suffered an intolerable humiliation beneath that impertinent and unerring examination which darted straight into her carefully-treasured secret, and dragged it out into the light of day.

‘Ah!’ said Blanchette, with what was, for her, almost regret and almost sympathy, ‘ah, I was sure of it! I have always been sorry that I said anything to you that day. But why do you care? If I were you, I should not care. What does it matter what he wishes? Men always wish for what they cannot get; I have heard that said a hundred and a thousand times. And you are his wife, and you have all the houses, and all the jewels, and all the horses; and all the millions; and as he is always thinking of her, so people say, he will not mind what you do. You may amuse yourself just as you like. If I were you, I should go and play at the tables.’

‘Silence! You are insolent; you hurt me; you offend me,’ said Yseulte, with greater passion than she had ever yielded to in all her life. All the coarse consolations which the world would have given her, repeated and exaggerated on the worldly-wise lips of Blanchette, seemed to her the most horrible parody of her own sacred and intolerable woe, so carefully buried, as she thought, from any human eye.

‘It is true,’ said the child, offended and sullen. ‘Everyone knew he never loved you; he always loved her. Even in Paris last year——. But what does it matter? You have got everything you can want——’

But Yseulte had left her standing alone in the golden-coloured drawing-room of S. Pharamond, with the irises and roses so gaily broidered on the panels of plush.

Blanchette shrugged her shoulders as she glanced round the room. ‘What idiots are these sensitives!’ she thought, with wondering contempt. ‘What can it matter? She has all the millions——’

The mind of the little daughter of the latter half of the nineteenth century could go no farther than that.

She had all the millions!

She had meant, quite sincerely, to give sympathy and consolation, but she could not help fashioning both in her own likeness.

Yseulte, with a feverish instinct to reach solitude and the open air, left her tormentor within the house, and hastily covering herself, passed out into the gardens of S. Pharamond, and walked farther and faster than her physical strength, which had not been great since the birth of her child, was well fitted to bear. She longed thirstily for the grey skies and the moist air of FaÏel, for the cold dusky seas of the north-west and the dim far-stretching lands. The light, the buoyancy, the glitter, the dry clear atmosphere of those southern shores, oppressed her and fevered her. If she had not altogether lost the habit of confidence in her husband, she would have said to him, ‘I sicken of all this drought and cloying sweetness. Let me go where the west wind blows; where the northern billows roll; where it is cold, and dusk, and green, and full of shadows; where it does not mock one’s pain with light and laughter!’

But she had lost that habit utterly: she never spoke of anything she felt or wished; she accepted all the days of her life as they came to her.

‘I have nothing of my own,’ she thought; ‘I have no right to wish for anything.’

He had made this place hers; he always spoke of it as hers; it was, indeed, her own inalienably; but she did not feel it to be so. It was only a part of his wide charity to her—the charity which she had thought was love.

She walked far, she scarcely knew herself where, taking her way mechanically through the grounds and into the fields and orange woods adjoining them, following the windings of the paths which wound upward between the great gnarled trunks of olives and beneath their hoary branches. As she ascended under the forest of olives, which was part of the lands of S. Pharamond, she could see below her a broad hunting road, cut in old times by the Maison de Savoie, neglected by the Commune, but kept in preservation by Othmar himself. She heard a sound of horses’ hoofs, and instinctively looked down; between the network of olive boughs she saw a low carriage, drawn by three black ponies abreast, and harnessed in the Russian manner, their abundant manes streaming on the wind as they dashed headlong down the steep incline. They were followed by two outriders in liveries of deep mourning.

The woman who drove them looked upward, and made a slight salutation with a smile.

It was Nadine Napraxine.

In another instant the turn of the road hid them from sight, and the beat of the galloping hoofs was lost in the sound of a little torrent which fell down through the red bare rocks above, and fed with its moisture the beds of violets beneath the olives.