When Nadine Napraxine returned home that night she found a letter lying on the table, of whose superscription she recognised the writing.

‘So soon!’ she thought, with her little smile, which had always been so calm and so amused before the madnesses of men.

But when she had read it, it seemed like a living, burning, palpitating thing, so did its words throb and thrill with ardour, reproach, and pain. All the suffering and passion pent up in his soul for twelve long months had broken loose and were uttered in it.

He had written in the silence of the dawn, when all the world was quiet as the grave, and the loud beating of his heart was audible to his own ear as he realised that near him, beyond those few miles of feathery foliage and flower-scented fields, there lay sleeping the one woman he adored. The impulse to write so to her had been stronger than himself, and all wisdom, manhood, and pride spoke to him in vain. To her alone had he ever laid bare his heart; to her alone was he not ashamed to uncover all its weakness, all its rebellion, all its futile and feverish pain. Let her laugh if she would, he thought, but let her know all he suffered through her. For a year he had kept silent; chained down by the bonds of duty and of custom. For a year he had lived out his dreary days as best he might, bearing his burden mutely, and striving to do his best; but at the knowledge that she was near him, there in the pale, cool air of the daybreak, all his efforts at self-command were shattered as silk threads break in a nervous hand.

No one had ever written to her as he wrote now.

She read the letter, with the rosy light of the morning coming in through her half-closed shutters; and the words of it banished the sleep which hung like vapour about her languid eyes and her dreamy thoughts. The smile went away from her lips. The force of another human heart smote for once an echo from hers.

‘What madness!’ she murmured.

But it was a madness which seemed noble to her, beautiful in its folly, and even in its torture; she felt a strange emotion as she read and re-read the only message which he had sent to her in the whole months of a year. She sat lost in thought; hesitation was rare with her, but now she hesitated. With a word she could banish him for ever from her life. With a word she could call him for ever to her side. His face seemed to rise before her as she looked at the signature of his name; his voice seemed in her ear pleading, imperious, tender, as she had heard it a hundred times. A year had been lost; a year had passed and dropped in the past, and they had never looked upon each other’s faces. A certain emotion which she had never known stirred in her,—the weakness of a sudden yearning, of a sudden wistful desire.

‘Is this love too?’ she thought, with that ironical doubt of herself with which she had so often doubted others.

‘I have never cared,’ she thought, with scorn for the impulses which had moved her. But she cared now. The silence and the absence of those long months had been his friends. In her meditations she had confessed to herself that he had not been to her the mere poor slave and spaniel that other men had been; she had thought to herself more than once with a wonder at her own regret: ‘If he had only had patience! If he had only waited!’

She read the letter he had written twice again. Then she burned it. She did not need to keep it. Each word of it was written on her memory. When the day was warm with the light of the forenoon’s sunshine she went out into the air. She felt the need of movement, of space, of a fresh atmosphere. For the first time in her life a certain excitation had taken the place of her tranquil serenity. A certain restlessness had disturbed her indifference; she had the sense of having descended to some too great concession, of having let herself fall from her serene heights of power to some human feebleness and frailty.

‘If this be love?’ she mused again with doubt and disdain, casting on the awakening warmth of her own feelings that ice of scepticism with which she had so often frozen the hearts of others. ‘If I were only quite sure of what I feel,’ she thought, with that egoism which was so natural to her that it was part of her every impulse and of her every motive.

Life had a certain loveliness for her in her perfect liberty, though she still doubted whether its monotony would not mar even that. The sense of her entire freedom was still welcome to her, and the world awaited her as a courtier, hat in hand, awaits his queen. All its pleasures,—such as they were, she knew them all, and held them in slight esteem,—would be hers. She had youth, beauty, and wit, and, when the first two of these should have left her, would still have that power of great riches which, as a wise man has said, is the only one to which the modern world will bow. And yet a vague melancholy was upon her; that melancholy, like a light mist on a smiling landscape, which she had once said might have made her such a poet as Maikoff had she lived for ever in the solitude of the steppes.

She went out into the balmy air, clear as a crystal, and filled with the scent of blossoming orange-boughs. She stood awhile on the marble terrace and looked seaward. The memories of the dead men who so late had been living there beside her passed over her in the warmth and light of the morning with a chill, as the north wind will sweep through the sunshine and scatter the clusters of orange-buds. Of them all, it was of her husband that she thought with the nearest likeness to self-reproach which her nature made possible.

‘He was brave, he was as trustful as a dog, he was bon enfant,’ she mused, ‘and I do not think I ever said to him a single kind word before that last day—and then it was only said to deceive him!’

She remembered him as he had spoken to her on that day. He had had a certain dignity, the dignity of manliness, of simplicity, of truthfulness; and all that was left of him was lying, mere dry dust and bones, in his emblazoned coffin in the gilded gloom of the church at Zaraizoff.

‘Well—the dead are dead, and we shall soon be with them,’ she thought with a sigh, as she turned from the sea wall of the terrace and looked at the picturesque and irregular front of the house, covered with its gay garlands of creeping plants.

The place was hers, bought for her by Napraxine, as one may buy a bonbon-box for a child. It seemed that day to laugh with light and colour. Coming hither as she did from the endless night of a Russian winter, it seemed bathed in heat, and luminance, and flowers. She descended the steps to where her ponies waited, and went with them along the climbing roads into the hills above La Jacquemerille.

The day was still young. The bare mountain sides wore the hues of the jacinth and amethyst; the odours of sweet herbs and spring flowers were strong and sweet; far down below, unseen, the sea was sparkling, lending the sense of its presence and its freedom to all the gorges and hillsides above. Her swift-footed ponies bore her fleetly as the Hours bore Aurora through the roseate and golden radiance of the April morning.

With intention she guided them up the steep roads which led to the humble church of S. Pharamond, hidden beneath its great gnarled olive trees, and covered with its network of rose-boughs. She knew that Yseulte went there often in the forenoon, and the caprice moved her to see if she could meet, as if by chance, this poor child, whose fate lay in the hollow of her hand, like a bird taken from a trap to be strangled with a touch at pleasure of its keeper. The sense of such power was always sweet to her; although so familiar, its familiarity did not detract from its pleasure. It was the sole thing which did not by repetition grow monotonous. Her life had been short by years, but it had been full of such dominion. She had dealt with men and women as she chose, and to make or mar their destinies had always been the sole pastime of which she did not weary. Humanity was her box of puppets, as it is that of the Solitary of Varzin. To hold the strings of fate, to bind and loose the threads of circumstance, and weave the warp and woof of destiny, was the only science which had ever had charm over her changeful temperament and her sceptical intelligence. Beside it all other things were trivial and tame. She had never met anyone who had resisted her will; Othmar himself had done so for awhile, but he had lived to repent and to succumb.

The church of S. Pharamond was empty and silent; there was no office said that day; it was grey and still and mournful, and no living thing was in it save a swallow perched upon the altar rail. She pursued the steep hillside road, overhung with olive and fig trees, the wayside carpeted with gladiolus and the blue fleur-de-luce. Below, through the light green foam of spring foliage and the sombre masses of pine and ilex woods, there rose the towers and pinnacles of the chÂteau, rising slim and fantastic, against the azure of the sky. Around her the silence was unbroken, except by a tethered goat cropping euphorbia and ivy from a ruined wall.

Looking through the boughs of the olives, she saw afar off the figure of Yseulte. Where she was standing was on the land of Nicole Sandroz, the furrows, thick with flowers, climbing the hill slope, the orchard of lemon and olive hiding the low white walls of the house. She alighted, and left her little horses standing by a stone well made in the old wall where the goat was tethered. She wished to see the wife of Othmar, and she moved straight towards her where she sat beneath one of the gigantic olives, whose foliage spread in a misty cloud silvery and sea-green above her. She had uncovered her head in the deep shadow around her; her attitude was listless, spiritless, dejected; in the shade thrown from the olive boughs her face looked very colourless, worn, and thin. All her look of childhood had passed away, and almost all her youth as well. As she recognised her rival she trembled violently and rose to her feet, losing for the moment all self-control and presence of mind. Her large brown eyes dilated with fear, like a deer’s when it is hard pressed in the chase. She had scarcely self-command to make the common gesture of salutation.

Nadine Napraxine, smiling, approached her and looked at her with that critical and penetrating glance which, through its languor, could read all the secrets of the soul. She spoke the bland commonplaces of compliment and courtesy with her sweetest manner, her most gracious grace; and the girl, paralysed once again, as a hundred times before, murmured a stupid sentence or so, coloured, grew pale, hesitated, felt herself awkward, foolish, and constrained, and could not keep down the tremor which shook her from head to foot, thus suddenly confronted with the woman whom her husband loved. All the terror which she had felt in Paris returned to her with tenfold more suffering, tenfold more intensity. In the morning light, standing amongst the simple wild herbs and flowers, her foe had the same magical power of magnetism over her as she had had in the lighted drawing-rooms and theatres of Paris. She understood why she herself was nothing in her husband’s life, and this other was all.

With simple gracious words, as she might have spoken to a timid child, her enemy continued to address her, passing over her constraint and silence as though she perceived them not, and all the while that the smooth, careless phrases rose so easily on her lips she studied the changing colour and the frightened eyes of Yseulte with that amused and merciless analysis which was so common to her. She understood how all the whole being of her victim shrank from her as a bird shrinks from the gaze of a snake, yet how her courage and her pride strove with her emotion and vainly tried to hide her fear.

‘Oh, foolish, foolish child!’ she thought, from the height of her own assured strength, her own irresistible power. ‘If you mistrust yourself, you lie at the mercy of all your foes. Do you not know that the first necessity for all success is to believe in our own power to attain it? Nature has given you personal loveliness, but the gift is of no more use to you than a score of music in the hands of an ignorant who cannot read it, than a sculptor’s chisel in the fingers of a child. You love Othmar, and you weep for him; and you know how to do nothing more. Do you suppose that women govern men with tears? Do you suppose that their desires wake because a woman prays?’

There was derision, but there was a not unkind pity in her, as her eyes studied the face in which, despite its youth and delicacy and charm, Othmar could see no beauty.

‘Your child died?’ she said suddenly, as she sat there beside her unwilling and trembling captive. Yseulte bent her head; she could not trust her voice to answer.

‘Did you care so much?’ said Nadine Napraxine in wonder.

‘I wished that it had been myself.’

The words escaped her almost unawares. When they had been uttered she longed to recall them. They would sound, she knew, like a confession of sorrow to the ear of one to whom all the sorrow of her life was due.

‘Are you not happy, then, my dear?’ said Nadine Napraxine: her tone was grave and soft, and had for once no mockery or innuendo in it.

Yseulte grew paler even than she had been before; a frown of anger knitted her fair brow; her expression grew cold and hard.

‘I think you have no right to ask me that,’ she said, gathering with effort courage enough to oppose her dreaded foe. ‘I think you have no right. You are my husband’s friend, not mine.’

Nadine Napraxine smiled.

‘The frightened doe has its own bravery when roused,’ she mused; and aloud she only said, with all the sweet suave courtesy of her very gentlest manner:

‘His friend and yours. Surely that is the same thing? Or if it be not, you should be wise and make it so.’

She paused a moment, then added softly still:

‘Happiness only comes to the wise, my dear; it does not come to those who stake their all upon one cast like the mad gamblers in the salle de jeu behind those hills. But you are too young to understand; and if I spoke to you all day I should not teach you my philosophies.’

‘I do not wish to learn them.’

She spoke almost sullenly, almost rudely, as the natural courage of her temper asserted itself and strove to struggle against the paralysis of mesmerised fear in which the presence of her rival held her.

‘They have been useful,’ said Nadine Napraxine with a chillier intonation. ‘And for want of them, what have women—who can only love—made of their lives, and of their lovers? But since you will not allow that I am your friend, I will leave you to your sylvan solitudes. Adieu, my dear. It is not in the woods and hills that you will learn to recover that secret de bonheur which you have lost so early.’

She lingered a moment, looking at Yseulte with her meditative, languid, unrevealing gaze. The girl’s lips trembled, her throat swelled, her eyes filled with scorching tears; she turned abruptly away lest her self-control should altogether fail her. She knew that she had betrayed herself as utterly to her enemy’s eyes as though she had poured out in words all the piteous secrets of her aching heart. Nadine Napraxine passed slowly beneath the olive branches, brushing the humble flowers with her careless sovereign’s step.

‘She is foolish, she is simple, she is awkward, and she is most unwise,’ she thought. ‘But she is brave——’

It was the quality which she always honoured.