A few minutes after Othmar had left the house her groom of the chambers ushered into the library the Duc de Vannes and his elder daughter. Blanchette, muffled up to her dancing turquoise-coloured eyes in sealskin, and with her small, impatient feet cased in little velvet boots lined with fur, in which costume Carlos Durand was about to paint her portrait for the salon, with a background of snow and frosted boughs taken from the Bois, sprang across the long room with the speed of a little greyhound, and embraced her cousin as if she had never loved anyone so much in all the days of her life. They had not met for six months, for Blanchette had been in penitence with her governesses and the dowager Duchesse de Vannes, in the depths of the Jura; a chastisement which had only sent her back to Paris two centimÈtres taller, full of resolution to avenge herself, and more open-eyed and quick-eared than ever.

‘Ah, my dearest! How happy I am to see you again!’ she cried in ecstasy, lifting her pretty little pale face to be kissed, in a transport of affection.

‘Il faut la mÉnager: elle est si riche!’ she had said to Toinon that morning, who was in bed with a cold, and who had grumbled in answer, ‘Autrefois elle Était si bÊte!’ to which Blanchette had judiciously replied, ‘On n’est jamais bÊte quand on est riche.’

De Vannes, when his little daughter’s ecstasies were somewhat spent, approached with a smile and kissed the hand of Yseulte with a reverential but cousinly familiarity.

‘Out so early!’ she said in surprise. ‘Surely you never used to see the outer air till two o’clock?’

‘I brought this feu-follet to enjoy your kindness,’ said the Duc, ‘that I might have the pleasure of seeing you before all the world does. I wished, too, to be the first to congratulate you, my cousin, on your brilliant success last night. You were perfect, marvellous, incredible!——’

‘I think I was much like any one else,’ said Yseulte, to check the torrent of his adjectives; ‘and the success of the ball was due more to Julien than to us; he was so enchanted to have a ball to organise in this great house after so many years without any receptions.’

‘Julien is an admirable maÎtre d’hÔtel, no doubt,’ answered de Vannes, with a smile; ‘and he is happy in possessing a young mistress who appreciates his zeal and fidelity, but it is not of Julien that all Paris is talking and sighing this morning.’

‘They must be talking and sighing in their beds then,’ said Yseulte, a little impatiently. ‘I thought no one was up so early as this except myself. Is the Duchesse well? She was so kind last night; she gave so much entrain——’

‘You know I never see her till dinner, if then, unless I chance to cross her in the Bois,’ answered the Duc, a little irritably.

He had risen three hours too early, and had bored himself to bring his little daughter here in his coupÉ; and he felt that so much self-sacrifice was not likely to avail him anything except that as he looked at Yseulte he could see for once in his life a woman who was still prettier in the morning than at night. He himself did not bear that trying light well; the lines about his eyes were deep and not to be hidden by any art, his eyes were dull and heavy, his cheeks hollow, and his moustache dyed. By night he was still one of the most elegant of la haute gomme, and his natural distinction could never altogether leave him; but his manner of life had aged him prematurely, and he felt old beside the freshness and the youth of Yseulte.

His vanity and his good sense alike counselled him to retire from a position which would avail him nothing; but a certain malice, which was a part of his character, and which his little daughter had inherited in increased degree, prompted him first to take reprisal for the indifference of his reception. Yseulte remained standing, holding the hand of Blanchette, evidently not desiring that he should be long there, and giving him no invitation to protract his visit until her breakfast hour. Blanchette’s mischievous eyes watched her father’s visible annoyance with keen appreciation of it; she had not forgotten the medallion given at Millo, and she had guessed very well why she had received the extraordinary honour of a seat in his brougham as he drove to the Jockey. She had been just about to leave the house with her maid when the Duc, passing her in the vestibule, had said carelessly: ‘Is it you, you little cat? Ah, you are going to your cousin. Well, jump in with me, and I will set you down as I pass; I am going to the Jockey.’ Now Blanchette knew as well as he did that the way from their house to the Jockey Club did not by any means lie past the HÔtel d’Othmar; but she had been too shrewd to say that, and too proud of driving beside her father, who smoked a big cheroot, and told her about the little theatres.

‘Can I see Othmar?’ he asked now, as he made his adieux to Yseulte.

‘I am sorry, but he is just gone out,’ she answered; ‘I think he is gone for some hours; I do not know where.’

‘You will soon learn not to say so,’ thought the Duc, diverted even in his discomfiture by her simplicity. He said aloud:

‘Do you think he may have gone to see the Napraxines? He was always a great friend of theirs, and they arrived last night; it is in all the papers, but then you do not read the papers. I only ask, because I should be so glad if I could meet him anywhere. The Prefect of Nice writes to me about the basin of Millo; now S. Pharamond has much more sea-front and much larger share of the harbour than we have, and if Othmar would use his influence, one word from him——’

‘I will tell him; he will be sure to come to you or write to you,’ she said quickly. She had flinched a little at the name of the Napraxine, which no one had spoken to her since that silver statue of the Love with the empty gourd had been sent to her before her marriage.

‘Bien jouÉ, petit papa,’ thought Blanchette, with understanding and appreciation, as her father bowed himself out of Othmar’s library.

‘Oh, how happy you are!—how I wish I were you!’ she cried, five minutes later, as she skipped about her cousin’s boudoir, while the glow of the fire of olive-wood shone on the panels which Bougereau had painted there with groups of those charming nude children which he can set frolicking with almost the soft poetic grace of Correggio.

Yseulte smiled on the little impudent face of the child, who leaned her elbows on her knees as she spoke.

‘I am very happy,’ she said, with perfect truth. ‘But I hope you will be as much so one day, Blanchette.’

Blanchette nodded.

‘I shall marry into the finance too; the noblesse is finished; papa says so. He said yesterday, “Nous sommes de vieux bonzes—emballons-nous!”’

Blanchette tied her arms and legs in a knot as she had seen a clown do, and made a pantomimic show of being rolled away on a wheelbarrow; then she gathered herself up and came and stood before her cousin and hostess.

‘Te voilÀ, grande dame!’ she cried, looking at her with her own little pert flaxen head, with its innumerable little curls held on one side critically, as she surveyed Yseulte from head to foot with a frank astonishment and admiration. It was only such a little while ago that Yseulte had been her butt and victim at Millo; that she had ridiculed her for her grey convent dress, her thick shoes, her primitive, pious habits, brought from the Breton woods, and lo!—here she stood, ‘trÈs grande dame!’ as Blanchette, a severe judge in such matters, acknowledged to herself. So tall, so elegant, so stately, with her beautiful slender hands covered with great rings, and her morning-gown a cascade of marvellous old lace. ‘She looks quite twenty years old!’ thought Blanchette. ‘How nice it must be to be married, if one get grown up all at once like that!’

She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she was unusually quiet for a little time, during which her terrible eyes scanned every detail of Yseulte’s appearance, from the pearl solitaire at her throat to the gold buckles in her shoes. Then, with a shriek of laughter, she cried aloud:

‘Do you remember when you came first to us you had leather shoes—leather!—and no heels, and mamma sent you at once to have some proper shoes; and how you could not walk a step in them, and cried?’

‘I remember,’ said Yseulte good-humouredly, ‘but I wonder you do—you were so little.’

‘Oh, I never forget anything,’ replied Blanchette, sagely. ‘What beautiful feet you have now, and you are so grown, so grown! And I want to see all your jewels. Mamma says they are wonderful. I love jewels.’

‘You shall see them, if you like, by-and-bye. But you did see many before my marriage.’

‘But mamma says he has given you ever so many more since—that you were covered with them at your ball.’

‘He is always generous.’

Yseulte smiled as she spoke—the dreamy introspective smile of one who recalls happy hours.

‘Tope-lÀ, while it lasts,’ said the small cynic before her.

‘Hush,’ said Yseulte, with some disgust.

‘Papa never gives mamma anything,’ pursued Blanchette. ‘Papa gives heaps of things to Mdlle. Fraise; the one they call Rose Fraise. She plays; she has eyes like saucers; she is at the VariÉtÉs; she rides a roan horse in the Bois of a morning. Don’t you go to the theatre every night? When I marry I shall have a box at every house. I have gone to Hengler’s. Now show me the jewels, will you?’

To humour the child, Yseulte took her to her dressing-room, where the tortoiseshell and silver box, which was the outer shell of the iron fire-proof jewel case, was kept, and told her women to open it. Blanchette remained in an almost religious ecstasy before the treasures exposed to her adoring eyes. Nothing could awe this true child of her century except such a display as she now saw of ropes of pearls, streams of sapphires, emeralds green as the deep sea, diamonds in all possible settings, rare Italian jewels of the Renaissance, and Byzantine and Persian work of the rarest quality. She was, after an hour’s worship, with difficulty persuaded to leave the spot where such divine objects were shut within their silver shrine defended by Chubb’s locks.

‘You are happy!’ she said, with a sigh.

Yseulte glanced at a miniature of Othmar which stood near.

‘That is worth them all!’ she said, and then coloured, vexed that she had betrayed herself to the artificial, satirical mockery of the child.

But Blanchette did not hear; she was thinking of the great diamonds lying like planets and comets fallen out of the sky into their velvet beds.

‘Dis donc,’ she said abruptly, ‘what is your budget for your toilettes? You would not tell me when you married; tell me now.’

‘I do not think it concerns you, my dear, and your mamma knows,’ replied Yseulte.

‘Oh, it made mamma very angry; she said he gave you three times as much as she has; that is why I want to know what it is, because then I should know what hers is. And I know she is in debt so deep!’ and Blanchette held her little hand high above her head. ‘What is the first thing you ordered, Yseulte? Me, I should order a petticoat with valenciennes quite up to the top; like that they are three thousand francs each. Yours are like that? You have got them in all colours, and ever so many white satin ones too? If I were you, I should be all day long with the lingÈres and costumiers. Are you not with them all day long?’

‘No, I have ordered nothing; I want nothing; I have such quantities of clothes;—if I live to be a hundred I shall never wear them out!——’

‘Wear them out!’ cried Blanchette, with a scream which was as inimitable as a shriek of Judic’s or Jeanne Granier’s. ‘What an expression! One would think you were a doctor’s wife in the provinces. You know you can never wear anything more than three times, and a toilette du soir never but once. Your maids surely tell you that?——’

‘I wear what they put out,’ said Yseulte, a little amused. ‘But I doubt very much whether I shall ever care about chiffons; not in your sense of caring, Blanchette. Of course I like pretty things, but there are so many other ways of spending money.’

‘What ways?’ said the child sharply. ‘Play? Horses? The Bourse? Or do you buy big jewels? It is very safe to buy big jewels; you can run away with them in revolution, sown in your stays——’

‘There is so much to do for the poor,’ said Yseulte, with a little hesitation; she feared to seem to boast of her own charity, yet she thought it wrong to let the child think that she spent all she had selfishly and frivolously.

Blanchette’s little rosy mouth grinned.

‘For the poor? One can quÊter; that is always amusing. I stood at the door of S. Philippe after Mass last month, and I got such a bagful of napoleons, and I wore a frock, couleur de feu, and a Henri-Trois hat, and Monseigneur himself kissed me—it was great fun—there was a crowd in the street, and one of them said, “‘Est crÂne, la pÉtiote!” It was a baker’s boy said it; I threw him a napoleon out of the bag.’

‘Oh, Blanchette!—out of the alms money!’

‘Why not? I put a dragÉe in instead, and I dare say the boy was poor, or he wouldn’t have had a basket on his head. Monseigneur said to mamma that I was one of the children of heaven!’

And Blanchette made her pied de nez, and waltzed round on one foot.

‘You could buy the whole of Siraudin’s and not feel it,’ she resumed enviously. ‘You could buy half Paris they say; why don’t you?’

‘I have all I want,’ said Yseulte; ‘very much more than I want.’

‘That is nonsense; one need never stop wishing——’

‘One must be very ungrateful then,’ said Yseulte. ‘But you can wish as much as you like this morning; you shall have your wishes. Only I should like to hear you wish that Toinon were with you. Poor Toinon, at home with her sore throat!’

‘I don’t wish that at all,’ said Blanchette sturdily. ‘She pinches, she gobbles, and she is vulgar, if you like; she swears like the grooms. You know our rooms overlook the stables; we can hear all the men say when they are cleaning the horses. Toinon makes signals to the English tiger Bob, and he to her. Toinon will only marry someone who keeps a fine meute and good colours for a hunting-dress. She only lives for the Cours Hippique. She got her sore throat because she would go on M. de Rochmont’s break when it was raining.’

‘Poor Toinon! You ought to be so fond of each other. If I had had a sister——’

‘Ab-bah!’ said Blanchette; ‘you would have hated her! I can never have a scrap of pleasure in a new frock because Toinon always has one too; I know I do not make half the effect I should do if I were all alone!’

‘Hush! If Toinon died, only think how sorry you would be!’

Blanchette laughed in silence; she did not dare to say so, but she thought that if Toinon did die it would be a bore in one way, because death always dressed one in black, and shut one up in the house; but otherwise—there were quantities of Toinon’s things which she would like to possess herself, and in especial a set of pink coral, which Toinon’s godmother, the Queen of Naples, had given her, which was delicious. Blanchette’s own godmother was but little use to her, being a most religious and most rigid Marquise, who dwelt on her estates in a lonely part of La VendÉe, and only made her presents of holy books and crucifixes and relics in little antique boxes.

‘Do you know, Yseulte,’ she continued, with her persistent prattle, as she hopped round the room, examining and appraising as accurately as a dealer at the Drouot the treasures which it contained, ‘they make bets about you at the clubs? How nice that is! Nobody is anything in Paris till the clubs do that. Papa and the Marquis have a hundred thousand francs on it, and mamma laughs;—they think I don’t hear these things, but I do.’

‘Bets on me?’ repeated Yseulte in wonder. ‘Why should they bet about me?’

‘Oh, they bet as to whether you will be the first to flanquer Count Othmar, or he you. They often make that sort of bet when people marry. Papa is all for you; he says you will be flanquÉe, and bear it like an angel,—“like a two-sous print of S. Marie!” said mamma.’

Yseulte coloured with natural indignation.

‘You have no right to repeat such things if you hear them, Blanchette,’ she said, with only a vague idea of the child’s meaning. ‘You might make great mischief. If Count Othmar were to know——’

‘Bah!’ said Blanchette. ‘You will not tell him. You are in love with him; they all say so; it is what they laugh at: it is what they bet about—how long it will last, who will get him away first, what you will do, whether you will take some one else. Papa says you will not; mamma says you will: they quarrel ever so often about it. You see,’ continued Blanchette, with her mixture of blasÉ cynicism and childish naÏvetÉ, which made her say the most horrible things with only a half perception of their meaning, ‘they all only marry for that, to be able to take some one else; that is why it does not matter if one’s husband is as old as the Pont Neuf and as ugly as Punch. You happen to be in love with your’s, and he is handsome; but it only makes them laugh, and he was never in love with you—mamma says so; he married you because he was angry with Madame Napraxine, and he wanted to do something to vex her.’

Blanchette, who was given to such ruthless analysis of other people, did not dissect her own emotions, so that she was ignorant of the malice which actuated her speech, of the unconscious longing which moved her to put a thorn in the rose. She wanted all those jewels for herself! She knew very well she could not have them, that she would be laughed at by Toinon and everybody if it were known she wished for them; still, the longing for them made it pleasant to her to plant her little poisoned dagger in the happy breast of her cousin. But she paused, for once frightened at the sudden paleness of her cousin’s face.

Yseulte gave a little low cry, like a wounded animal; she felt the air grow grey, the room go round her, for a moment, with the intensity of her surprise, the shock of her pain. But in another moment she recovered herself; she repulsed, almost without pausing to examine it, a suspicion which was an offence to himself and her. She laid her hand on the little gay figure of the cruel child, and stopped her in her airy circuit of the room, with a gesture so grave, a rebuke so calm, that even Blanchette was awed.

‘My little cousin,’ she said, with an authority and a serenity which seemed all at once to add a score of years to her age, ‘you can jest with me, and at me, as much as ever you like, I shall forgive it and I shall never forget all I owed once to your mother; but if you venture to speak again of my husband without respect, I shall not forgive it. I shall close his house to you, and I shall tell your parents why I do so.’

Blanchette looked furtively up in her face, and understood that she was not to be trifled with. She began to whimper, and then to laugh, and then to murmur in the coaxing way she had when she had been most in fault.

‘How grand you have grown, and how old in twelve months! You know I only talked nonsense; I never heard them say a word; I only wanted to teaze you; it is so silly, you see, Yseulte, to be so in love with M. Othmar, it is so bourgeoise and so stupid, and they all say that it is not the way to keep him. Me, when I marry, I will always make my husband call me Madame, and I will never let him touch but the tip of my little finger, and I will eat oysters every day, and drive the horse that wins the Grand Prix in my basket in the Bois. Dis, donc! you will not tell mamma I said anything naughty?’

‘I shall not tell her,’ said Yseulte, who could not so quickly smile. She felt as if some one had run a needle straight through her heart.

Blanchette laid her curly head against her cousin’s breast:

‘I do love you, Yseulte,’ she murmured. ‘You are always true, and you are always kind, and you are so handsome, so handsome! MerciÉ, and all the sculptors say so; and all the painters too. The Salon will be full of your busts and your portraits; Madame Napraxine is only a pale woman with great black eyes like coals in a figure of snow——’

‘I desire you not to speak of Madame Napraxine!’ said Yseulte, with a violence which startled herself and momentarily shook her self-control.

The child, who had ignorantly meant to atone and to console for her previous offence, was genuinely alarmed at her failure.

‘I only meant that you are much prettier, much handsomer, than she is,’ she stammered.

‘Madame Napraxine’s beauty is celebrated,’ said Yseulte, with enforced calmness. ‘Leave off your habit of indulging in personalities, Blanchette; it is a very vulgar fault, and it makes you malicious for the pleasure of fancying yourself witty. Come and feed my peacocks; they are birds who will recommend themselves to your esteem, for they are intensely vain, artificial, and egotistic; they believe flowers only grow that they may pull them to pieces.’

‘I don’t care for the peacocks,’ said Blanchette. ‘Drive me in the Bois in the Daumont with the four white horses, and you can buy me something at Siraudin’s as we go.’

‘As you like,’ said Yseulte.

Yseulte humoured the child’s caprices, and drove her out into the cold sparkling air with the four white horses, with their postilions in black velvet caps and jackets, which Blanchette condescended to praise as the most chic thing in all Paris. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that they were even more chic than the Napraxine black horses and Russian coachman, but she restrained herself, unwilling to offend her cousin before they stopped on their return from the Bois at Giroux’s, at Siraudin’s, and at Fontane’s, for Blanchette was too sensible to be satisfied with toys and bonbons, and set her affections on three monkeys in silver-gilt, playing at see-saw on a tree trunk of jade, with little caps made of turquoises on their heads.

When she had chattered herself tired, and the day was declining, she consented to allow herself to be driven home, and Yseulte returned alone to the Boulevard S. Germain. For the first time since her marriage her heart was heavy. The selfishness and greed of her little companion were nothing new to her, but they had been made painfully evident in that drive through Paris; and the wound which the child had given her still smarted, as the bee-sting throbs after the insect has flown away. It was not that she believed what was said; she was too loyal and too innocently sure of her husband’s affection to dishonour him by such suspicion. Yet the mere knowledge that such things were said of him and herself hurt her delicacy and her pride cruelly, and she knew well that, if the Duchesse de Vannes said so, then the world said so too. And her heart contracted as she thought involuntarily, ‘Why should they speak of Madame Napraxine at all in connection with me, unless—unless he had loved her?’

Yseulte was too young to think with composure of the women who had preceded herself in the affections of her husband; she could not console herself, as older or colder women would have done, with the reflection that every man has many passions, and that the past should be a matter of indifference to one who was indissolubly united with his present and his future. To her it seemed that if he had ever loved any one else he could not care for her; all the ignorance and exaggeration of youth made this seem a certainty to her.

She was no longer the calm and innocent child that she had been at Millo; the passions of humanity had become to stir in her; love, the great creator and the great destroyer, had taken possession of her, and had roused in her impulses, jealousies, desires, of whose existence she had never dreamed; her temperament, naturally sweet and spiritual, had beneath it unknown springs of ardour and of passions: le vin mousseux, which her cousin Alain had said was latent in her blood from the impetuous and voluptuous race of her fathers. She could not wholly recover from the shock which she had received, as from a bolt that fell from sunny skies. It had been only a child’s frothy foolish chatter, no doubt; yet the mere suggestion made in it clung to her memory with a cruel and terrible persistency. She did not doubt that the child had only repeated what she had heard; she knew that Blanchette’s memory was as retentive as a telephone; and if the Duchesse de Vannes had said it, then the world had thought it. She had not allowed Blanchette to perceive the pain that she had caused; but as her horses had flashed through the chill bright frosty air of Paris, and the child’s gay shrill voice had chattered incessantly beside her, she had suffered the first moments of anguish that she had known since her marriage. As she drove now through the streets of Paris, in which the lamps were beginning to sparkle through the red of the winter sunset, she felt a strange sense of solitude amidst those gay and hurrying crowds through which her postboys forced their fretting horses.

At AmyÔt, on the days when Othmar had left her, she had never felt alone; she had amused herself with the dogs, the birds, the horses, the woods; she had dreamed over her classic music, or read some book which he had recommended, and spent hours looking from the balustrade of the great terrace, or from the embrasure of a window to watch for the first appearance in the avenue of the horses which should bring him from the station of Beaugency. She had never felt alone at AmyÔt, but here in the city which she loved from the associations of childhood, and as the scene of her marriage, in this city which regarded her as one of the most fortunate of its favourites of fortune, she felt a sense of utter loneliness as the carriage rolled through the gates.

The suisse told her that Othmar had not come home.

She went upstairs to her boudoir and threw off her close-fitting-coat of sables and her sable hat, and sat down beside the olive-wood fire, drawing off her long gloves. The room was softly lighted with a rose-tinted light which shone on the gay children painted by Bougereau, the flowered satin of the curtains and couches, the Dresden frames of the mirrors, the marqueterie of the tables and consoles, the bouquets of roses of all growths and colours. She looked round it with a little sigh; with the same sense of chillness and sadness. Everything in it seemed to echo the cruel words: ‘He only married you to anger her!’

In the morning the whole chamber had seemed to smile at her from all the thousand trifles, which spoke in it of his tender thoughtfulness for herself; now, the roses in their bowls, the children on their panels, the amorini holding up the mirrors, the green parrots swinging in their rings, all seemed to say with one voice, ‘What if he never loved you?’

Her arms rested on her knees and her face on her hands, as she sat in a low chair before the fire which burned under white marble friezes of the Daphnephoria, carved by the hand of ClÉsinger. She could never ask him, she could never ask any one, of this cruel doubt, which had come into her perfect peace as a worm comes into a rose. All her pride shrank from the thought of laying bare such a wound. Not even in the confessional could she have brought herself to breathe a whisper of it. She was not yet seventeen years old, and she had already a doubt which, like the pains of maternity, she must shut in her heart and bear as best she might alone. She had both courage and resignation in her nature, and she needed both.

‘It is impossible!’ she murmured unconsciously, half aloud, as the memory of a thousand caresses and gestures, which seemed to her to be proof of the most absolute love, came to her thoughts with irresistible persuasion, and made her face grow warm with blushes even in her solitude. It was impossible that he did not love her—he who had been free to choose from the whole world.

‘It is impossible!’ she murmured, with her head lifted as though in some instinct of combat against some unseen foe.

‘What is impossible?’ said Othmar, as he entered the room and approached behind her, unseen until he had drawn her head backward and kissed her on the eyes. ‘What is impossible, my child?’ he repeated. ‘No wish of yours if you tell it to me.’

She coloured very much, and rose, and remained silent. Her heart was beating fast; she did not know what to reply. By the light of the fire he did not see how red she grew and then how pale. He seated himself in a low chair and took her by the hand.

‘What is so impossible,’ he said carelessly, ‘that you dream of it in my absence in the dark?’

‘Nothing,—at least,—I would rather not say,’ she murmured.

‘As you like,’ said Othmar. ‘You know I am not Blue Beard, my dear.’

A great longing rushed through her to tell him what the Duchesse de Vannes had said, and ask him if it were true or false—he who alone could know the secrets of his own heart,—but sensitiveness, timidity, delicacy, pride, all made her mute. What use would it be to ask him? He would never wound her with the truth if the truth were what her cousin had said.

Othmar smiled kindly as he looked at her; she did not know that if he had loved her more he would have been more curious before this, her first secret, less willingly resigned to be shut out from her confidence.

‘Who has been with you to-day?’ he asked. ‘Oh, I remember, you have had little Blanchette. What a terrible child; she is an Elzevir compendium of the century. Has she said anything to vex you? She is as malicious as Mascarille——’

Yseulte touched his hand timidly. There was a grain of fear in her adoration of him, that fear which enters into all great love, though Nadine Napraxine and Madame de Vannes would have ridiculed it as ‘jeu de lac et de nacelle,’ the ‘vieux jeu’ of the romanticists and sentimentalists.

‘You do love me?’ she said, very low, with much hesitation, while her colour deepened.

Othmar looked up quickly with a certain irritation.

‘Has that pert baby told you to doubt it? Can that be a question between you and me? My dear child, would you be by me now if I did not do so?’

And he soothed her agitation by those caresses with which a man can so easily and with pleasure to himself counterfeit warmth and tenderness to a woman who has youth and grace and cheeks as soft as the wing of a bird.

‘Yseulte,’ he said gravely a few moments later, ‘do not listen to what other women say to you; if you do, you will lose your beautiful serenity and fret yourself vainly by doubts and fancies. There is nothing on earth so cruel to a woman as women. They envy you—not for me—but for what you possess through me and for the face and form with which nature has dowered you. Do not let them poison your peace. I am not afraid that they will corrupt your heart, but I am afraid that they may distress and disturb you. We cannot live all our lives in seclusion at AmyÔt, and the world must come about you soon or late. To be in the world means to be surrounded with jealousies, cruelties, enmities, ingratitude, and malice; if we once lend our ear to what these will tell us, we shall have no more happiness. You have been like your favourite, S. Ignace; by reason of your own purity you have been allowed to hear the angels sing. Do not let the world’s clamour drown that divine song, for once lost no one ever hears it again! Do you understand what I mean, my dear?’

She said nothing, but she hid her face on his breast and burst into tears, the first that he had ever seen from her eyes.

‘Can they not let her alone,’ he thought with anger, and a sense of weariness and apprehension; if the world taught her what men’s love could be, would she not discover what was missing in his?