“by the way,” said the young man, still with his eyes closed, and indisposed to follow his companion’s lead into the domain of sentiment, “i saw the most beautiful woman last night that i ever saw in my life—the most glorious creature! such eyes! you can’t imagine such eyes!”
“what color?” asked mouse, with a glance at her own eyes in an adjacent mirror and a displeased severity on her mouth.
“black—black as night! at least, you know, perhaps they weren’t really black; they were like that stone—what do you call it—opal? no; onyx—yes, onyx. such a woman! i’m a bad ’un to please, but, on my honor——”
“you are very enthusiastic!” said mouse, with the lines of her lips more scornful and displeased. “where did you see this miracle?”
brancepeth smiled.
“lord, how soon they are jealous!” he thought. “take fire like tow!”
aloud he answered:
“yesterday my sister got me to go to complines at the oratory. it was some swell saint or another, and some of the cracks were singing there. this woman was close to where i was. she was all in black, and seemed very much ‘gone’ on the service; her eyes got full of tears at part of it. well, i don’t mind telling you she fetched me so that i asked the duc d’arcy to see my sister safe home, and i followed the lady with the eyes. she got into a little dark coupé, and my hansom bowled after it. i ran her to earth at a private hotel—quite solemn sort of place called brown’s—and there they told she was the countess zu lynar.”
“countess zu lynar! then one can soon see who she is,” said mouse, as she went and got an almanac de gotha of the year from her writing-table.
[72]“oh, i looked there last night,” said brancepeth; “she isn’t there; but the porter told me she used to be the wife of that awfully rich banker vanderlin.”
mouse looked up, astonished and momentarily interested.
“are you quite sure?”
“positive.”
“then she can’t be young now,” said lady kenilworth, with relief and satisfaction.
“oh, yes, she is; at least, quite young enough,” said brancepeth vaguely.
“oh, i know all about her!” continued his friend. “she is not in society. we stand a good deal in london, but at present we don’t receive divorced women.”
brancepeth laughed softly with vast amusement, and did not offer any explanation of his laughter.
“such eyes!” he murmured dreamily. his friend was silent. after a while—“oh, lord, such eyes!”
“my dear harry,” said mouse, with cold dignity, “pray spare me your lyrics, and go and write them in the porter’s book at the private hotel. you could probably approach the lady without the formula of introduction; a bouquet would do it for you.”
brancepeth shook his head mournfully.
“not that sort,” he said gloomily. “and you needn’t be in such a wax about it, mouse; she’s gone back to the continent this morning. they told me so at the hotel just now.”
“and you did not go to dover instead of coming here?” said his friend sarcastically. “i am amazed that old acquaintance had such a hold remaining on you as to make you resist the seductions of the tidal train.”
“you can be nasty about it if you like,” said the handsome youth with sullen resignation. “you make the mistake which all women make. you fly at a man when he tells you the truth; and then you are astonished another time that he tells you a lie. if there’d been anything in it, of course i shouldn’t have told you anything.”
“an admirable confession. i shall remember it another time.”
[73]“women always make fellows lie. you bite our noses off if we ever happen to tell a word of truth!”
“but it breaks my heart to think that you even see that other women exist, harry!”
“oh, bother!” said brancepeth roughly. “don’t be a fool, mousie. you see other men exist fast enough yourself.”
she was silent. she was conscious that she did do so. happily for the preservation of peace, there was at that moment announced prince khristof of karstein.
“her father,” murmured mousie in a swift whisper, but brancepeth was too obtuse to understand; he only stared, conscious that he had missed a tip.
prince khristof was a bland, gracious person who had been very fair in youth and early manhood, and still preserved a delicate clear complexion and eyes as blue and serene as clare kenilworth’s; his hair was white and silken, his form slender and stately, his carriage elegant; and, alas! there was not a good club in all the world into which he could take his charming presence. when the century was young he had been born the seventh son of a then reigning duke in a small principality of green pasture and glacier-fed stream, and pretty towns like magnified toys, and many square leagues of resinous scented pine forest. the century had seen the principality absorbed, the dukedom mediatized, the towns ruined, and the pine-woods leased to javish banks. as in many other cases the gain of the empire had been the ruin of the province. prince khristof’s eldest brother still abode in his toy-city, and hats were lifted as he passed, but he reigned no more; and prince khristof himself, who had been a colonel of cuirassiers in his cradle, and at ten years old had seen a sentinel flogged for omitting to carry arms when he had passed, was glad to furnish a mansion for mr. massarene, and take forty per cent. from the decorators and dealers, who under his patronage furnished the admirable clodion and the other rarities, beauties, and luxuries, to the adornment of harrenden house.
he felt it hard that when he had permitted his daughter to marry into finance the misalliance had so little profited himself that he was driven to such expedients. but so it[74] was; and though the descent had been gradual, it had been one which ended in avernus, and royal and patrician society had shut all its great gates upon him, leaving him only its side entrances and back staircases. the man who could remember when he had been a child in his nurse’s arms, seeing guards carry arms to salute him as he was borne past them suffered acutely from his degradation: but he was beyond all things a philosopher, and thought that fine tobaccos and delicate wines soothe, if they do not cure, many wounds, even when you can only enjoy such things at the expense of your inferiors.
“this old beggar ought to know,” thought brancepeth, occupied with his new idea and to whom germans meant every nationality from schleswig-holstein to moldavia; and he addressed the newcomer point-blank.
“do you know a countess lynar, sir?”
“i know a great many lynars,” replied the prince. “it is a very general name. can you add anything more definite?”
“she’s the woman whom that jew fellow, vanderlin, divorced,” replied brancepeth.
the prince smiled and coughed.
“olga zu lynar? i know her—yes. she is my only daughter. vanderlin is a banker, but he is not a jew.”
brancepeth grew very red.
“i—i—beg you ten thousand pardons,” he muttered. “i didn’t know, you know; i am always blundering.”
“there is nothing to pardon,” said prince khris sweetly. “englishmen are so insular. they never know anything about their neighbors across the water. it is perfectly well known everywhere out of england that my daughter was—separated—from vanderlin, but that you, my lord brancepeth, should not know it is tout ce qu’il y a de plus naturel.”
“he takes it uncommonly coolly,” thought brancepeth, still under the spell of his astonishment, and still distressed as an englishman always is at having made a stupid mistake and wounded an acquaintance.
“but is she married again?” he asked anxiously. “how does she come to be lynar?”
“dear youth, you are not discreet,” thought the[75] prince, as he replied frankly that her mother had been a countess lynar, and that his daughter had taken her mother’s name, he was himself never very sure why; but she was always a little self-willed and fanciful, she was a woman; femme très femme! when she had married into la haute finance she had of course forfeited her place in the hof-kalendar.
“but her maiden name is there.” he turned over the leaves of the almanac de gotha and pointed to the entry of the birth of his daughter the countess olga marie valeria.
“why does she call herself countess lynar?” said brancepeth with curiosity, conscious of his own bad manners. prince khris pointed to the page:
“it was her mother’s name, you see; and more than that, in the property which my daughter possesses there is a little schloss lynar, hardly more than a ruin, hidden under woods in swabia which gives that title to whoever owns it. were you to purchase it you would have the right to write yourself graf zu lynar.”
“i would rather own the lady than the castle,” said brancepeth, too stupid and too careless to note the deepening offence in the eyes of mouse.
prince khris smiled meaningly.
“the lady might give you the more trouble of the two.”
“how he hates her!” thought brancepeth. “i suppose she keeps a tight rein on the property.”
brancepeth’s experiences, which had been extensive in range though brief in years, had told him that these family dislikes and disagreements usually had their root in the auri sacra fames; and the fact was well known all over europe that this serene, courtly, distinguished-looking gentleman, whose name was recorded in the hof-kalendar, lived very nearly, if not entirely, by his wits.
high play is one thing; cheating is another; if you ruin yourself it is your own affair, but if you try to ruin others by unfair means it is the affair of your neighbors. prince khristof’s mind was so made that he had never been able to perceive or comprehend the difference; of late years the meaning of that difference had been enforced on him disagreeably.
[76]“i suspect he is the devil and all to have anything to do with at close quarters,” reflected brancepeth, who was a very cautious young man. “and what a mess he’s made of his life, good lord, with all his cleverness and position; why, a decent croupier’s a ten thousand times better fellow; he’ll rook you like winking if he can get you down at écarté.”
“and she came over here to see you, i suppose,” inquired brancepeth, still curious.
“scarcely,” said the prince with a fleeting smile.
“would you—wouldn’t you give me a word of introduction?” said brancepeth hurriedly and conscious of his own temerity.
“to my daughter?” said the prince blandly. “my dear lord, i should of course be delighted to do so—delighted; but i am not on speaking terms with her. i don’t call on her myself. how can i send anybody else to call?”
“what did you quarrel about?” asked harry bluntly. “who was right?”
prince khris looked at him with amusement; it was so droll to find people who asked questions like children instead of finding out things quietly for themselves. to his finer and more philosophic intelligence such a primitive question as right could not seriously affect anything. he thought the young englishman a fool, an impertinent and dense fool; but he was never impatient of fools, they were too useful to him in the long run. what wise man would be able to play écarté unless there were fools with whom to play it?
“of course the divorce was all vanderlin’s fault!” said brancepeth with clumsy curiosity.
“it is always the man’s fault in such cases. that is well known.”
prince khris smiled as he spoke; there was something sardonic and suggestive about the smile which made it almost a grin, and which seemed singularly ugly to brancepeth considering that the person concerned was the grinner’s only daughter. no one could more completely or more cruelly have expressed the speaker’s conviction that vanderlin was entirely blameless in this matter.
[77]mouse listened in extreme irritation; it seemed to be beyond even her harry’s usual obtuseness to continue the theme of a woman’s indiscretions to that woman’s own father. besides, she hated women who were divorced: they made it so difficult and unpleasant for the wiser members of their sex.
“my daughter seems to have impressed you, lord brancepeth,” continued the prince. “where is it that you have seen her?”
“at the oratory,” said brancepeth, “and in the street. she is so awfully fetching, you know.”
“she is a woman who makes people look at her,” replied prince khristof indifferently. “did you hear her sing at the oratory? she has a voice! ah, such a voice! the most flexible mezzo-soprano. she could have made her fortune on the stage.”
“no. she didn’t sing,” said brancepeth, greatly interested. “she seemed to pray no end, and she cried. but she cried so beautifully. not as most of them do who make such figures of themselves. but the tears just brimming in her eyes and falling, like the what d’ye call ’em, you know, the magdalens in the picture galleries.”
the prince laughed outright.
“for felicitous allusion your englishman has never an equal,” he thought, whilst he said aloud: “my dear lord, what did i tell you? olga is femme, très femme. if i wanted to weep i should not go to the oratory myself. but a woman does go. it is a consolation to her to be admired and pitied, and i have no doubt she observed that you did both.”
“she didn’t even see me,” said the younger man, on whose not oversensitive nerves something in the elder’s tone grated.
“her father don’t do much to save her character,” he thought. “it’s an ill bird fouls its own nest.”
meanwhile mouse had listened with scarcely concealed impatience to all these questions and answers. she sat apparently engrossed in the pages of the almanac de gotha, but in reality losing nothing of her friend’s interrogations and implications. at last, out of patience, she[78] closed the little red book and said imperiously to brancepeth:
“surely it is time you went on guard? have you any idea what time it is? besides, if you don’t mind my saying so, i want to talk about something to the prince before i go for my drive.”
“i aren’t on guard to-day; but i’ll go, of course, if you want me to go,” murmured brancepeth sulkily, raising his lazy long limbs out of his comfortable resting-place with a sense of regret, for he would willingly have gone on talking about the lady of the oratory for another hour.
“such a dear good boy, but always wanting in tact,” said lady kenilworth, as the door of the morning-room closed on him.
“wanting in reason too. to talk of another woman when he is in the presence of lady kenilworth! what obtuseness! what blindness,” said prince khris with graceful gallantry. “but englishmen are always like that. they go all round the world and see nothing but their own umbrellas; they keep on their hats in st. peter’s, and set up their kodaks at the taj mahal. i have always said that a people who could conquer india and yet clothe their viceroy in a red cloth tunic, are a people without perception. they travel, but they remain islanders. their minds are enfolded in their bath-towels and sanitary flannels. they do not see beyond the rim of their tubs. but i believe you did me the honor to wish to speak to me? i need not say that if there be the smallest thing in which i can be of service you command my devotion.”
mouse sat dreamily and irritably opening and shutting the almanac de gotha. prince khristof wore a wholly altered aspect to her now that she saw him as the father of a woman whom harry admired and had followed.
“do you know—such is my insularity—that i never knew you had a daughter or had had a wife?” she said abruptly, as she pushed the book away.
“dear madame! you surely have not sent for me to speak of these two ladies?” he said, picking up the little red book. “my deceased wife’s name is here, if you chose to look for it; my daughter’s is not, because she exiled[79] herself into the haute finance. i once had the entire collection of this almanac since its beginning in 1760. if we want to see how despicably modern editions fall below the standard of all work of the last century, nothing will show us that fact more completely and conclusively than this almanac. contrast the commonplace portraits of to-day’s gotha with the exquisite designs of the eighteenth century kalendars.”
“yes,” said mouse shortly: “yes, no doubt. you are always right in matters of art. my dear prince, how very admirably you have housed those people at harrenden house. if only the birds were worthy the nest.”
“ah-ha! it was for this, was it, that you wanted to see me?” he thought, as he said aloud: “i suggested—i merely suggested. i am delighted the result meets your approval. they are excellent people, those good massarenes. you remember that i told you so in paris. des bons gens; de très bons gens. a little uncouth, but the world likes what is simple and fresh.”
she looked at him to see if he could really say all this with a serious countenance; she saw that he could; his handsome fair features were without the ghost of a smile and his whole expression was grave, sincere, attuned to admiring candor.
“if he takes it like that i had best take it so too,” thought mouse, who was aware that she was but a mere beginner and baby beside him in the delicate arts of dissimulation. but nature had made her proud, inclined to be blunt and sarcastic, and occasionally unwisely inclined to frankness; she looked him straight in the eyes now, and said:
“but you and i are going to do our duty to our fellow christians, and polish them, aren’t we? i was quite straight with you about the purchase of vale royal; but you weren’t so straight with me about harrenden house. don’t you think, prince, we can do our friends more good if we are friends ourselves? quarreling is always a mistake.”
he bowed and smiled. his smooth delicate features expressed neither annoyance nor pleasure, neither wonder nor surprise.
[80]“i am always lady kenilworth’s devoted servant,” he said graciously, with the air of a suzerain accepting homage. “i am sorry you think that i should have consulted you about the town-house,” he added. “it did not occur to me; you were in egypt. i never offend or forget those who wish me well—of that you may be sure. it was amusing to arrange that house, and one could be of so much use to artists and other deserving people of talent.”
mouse laughed, rather rudely, and her laughter brought a slight angry flush to the cheek of prince khris. he had both noble and royal blood in his veins, and at the sound of that derisive little laugh he could have strangled her with pleasure. by an odd contradiction, lady kenilworth offended him by precisely that same kind of bluntness and nakedness of speech with which her brother had offended herself. the delicate euphemisms which she expected to have used to please herself seemed to her altogether ridiculous when they were required by another person.
“englishwomen are always so coarse,” he thought; “they never understand veiled phrases. they will call their spade a spade. there is no need to do so, whether you are digging a grave with it or digging for gold; it can always be a drawing-room fire-shovel for other people, whatever work it may accomplish.
“yes, you are quite right, dear lady,” he added, after a slight pause. “the task is not a light one; we will divide its difficulties. i have experience that you have not yet gained; you have influence that i have—alas!—lost. let us take counsel together. our friends the massarenes are good people—excellent people; it is a pleasure to guide them in the way they should go.”
he remained with her half an hour, and only left her when it was announced that her carriage was waiting below. he kissed her hand with all the reverential grace which a fine gentleman can lend to his farewell; but as he descended the staircase and went into the street, he swore under his breath.
“there is no devil like a blonde devil!” he thought. “mouse they call her! a rat! a rat! with teeth as sharp as nails and claws which can cling like a flying bat’s! it[81] is little use for the world to have made woman all these thousands of years; she remains just what she was in eve’s time, in eriphyle’s time—always the same—always purchasable, always venal, always avaricious! ah! why was this rodent not my daughter? we would have made the world our oyster, and no one should have known the taste of an oyster but ourselves!”
whilst he passed along stanhope street into the park his own daughter was standing in a room of a secluded and aristocratic hotel in the faubourg st. germain, where she had arrived that morning.
she was dressed in black, with three strings of pearls round her throat; they were the pearls she had worn on her ill-fated marriage-day. she was a woman of singular beauty; the kind of beauty which resists sorrow and time, and ennobles even the mask of death.
with her was one of her cousins, ernst von karstein, the only one of her family who had been faithful to her through good and evil report, who had loved her always, before her marriage and after it; but who had always known that he could look for no response from her.
“you are always well, olga,” he was saying now. “what amulet have you?”
“i imagine,” she answered, “that my talisman consists in absolute indifference as to whether i be ill or well.”
“that is a blasphemy,” said her companion. “no one can be indifferent to health. ill-health intensifies every other evil and saps the roots of every enjoyment.”
“yet to lie on a sick bed, at peace with man and god, and surrounded by those we love, would that be so sad a fate?”
“you speak of what you know nothing about; you are never ill! you grow morbid, olga. you live like a nun. you see no one. the finest mind cannot resist the morbid influences of constant solitude. whoever your pope is, you should ask his dispensation from such vows.”
“the law has been my pope, and has set me free of all vows. i live thus because i do not care to live otherwise.”
“i should have thought you too proud a woman to accept excommunication in this submissive way.”
[82]she smiled a little.
“proud? i? the daughter of khristof of karstein, and the divorced wife of adrian vanderlin?”
“curse them both!” said her cousin under his breath.
“you have been in london?” he said aloud.
“a week, yes: my father’s affairs, as usual.”
“you never see him?”
“never. see the man who ruined my life!”
“but you have no proof of that?”
she smiled again very sadly.
“a crime which can be proved is half undone. he was too wary to be traced in all these schemes of infamy.”
“yet you befriend him?”
“befriend? that is not the word. i spend my mother’s money on him for her sake. one saves him at least from public disgrace. but he games away all he gets, and continues to live in the way you know.”
“i do not think you should waste your substance on him. keep it for yourself, and return to the world.”
“on sufferance, as a declasée? never!”
“as my wife. i have said so many times. i never change, olga.”
she held out her hand to him with a noble and grateful gesture.
“you are always faithful. you alone. i thank you. but you must leave me to my fate, dear ernst. it is not in your power to change it.”
“it would be in my power if you gave me the mandate.”
“but it is that which i cannot do; which i shall never do.”
“because you still love the man who repudiated and disgraced you!”
she shrank a little as at a blow.
“one cannot love and unlove at will,” she said simply. “it is very generous of you to be ready to give the shield of your umblemished honor to a dishonored woman. but were i ungenerous, unworthy enough, to accept such a sacrifice i should but make you and make myself more unhappy than we now are. all the feeling which is still alive in me lives only for the memory of the past.”
[83]her cousin turned away and paced the room to hide the pain he felt. he had loved her through good and evil report, had remained unmarried for her sake, and was ready now to accept all obloquy, censure and discredit for her sake.
“go, my dear ernst,” she said very gently; “go, and forget me. you might as well love a buried corpse as love a woman with such a fate as mine.”
“my love should have power to magnetize the corpse into fresh life!”
she shook her head.
“it would be impossible. were it possible, what use would be a galvanized corpse? an unnatural unreal thing which would drop back into the dust of death.”
he did not reply; he endeavored to control his emotion.
“my dear olga,” he said, when he could do so, “allow me to say one thing to you without causing you offence. unknown to yourself, i think you cherish an illusion which can only cause you unhappiness. you think and speak as if your division from adrian vanderlin were but some quarrel, some mistake, which explanation, mediation, or time could clear away. you forget that you are entire strangers to each other; worse than strangers, because there is an irrevocable chasm between you.”
she did not reply; an expression of intense suffering came into her eyes, but she restrained any outward utterance of it.
“it hurts me to say these harsh things to you,” he continued. “i would so much sooner encourage you in your sentiment. but to what end should i do so? you are a woman of deep and passionate feeling. you do not forget; you do not change; your little boy’s grave is to you what bethlehem was to the early christians; vanderlin is to you what ulysses was to penelope. you never seem to realize that this past to which you cling is a wholly dead thing, no more to be imbued again with the breath of life than the body of your poor child, or the marble which lies over him. it is intolerable that a woman as young, as lovely, as rich, as admired and as admirable as you are should pass your years in obscurity fettered to a pack of useless memories like a living person, to a corpse.[84] i have told you so often; i shall never cease to tell you so. what do you expect? what do you hope? what do you desire?”
“nothing.” the word was cold, incisive, harsh; he tortured her but she did not give any sign of pain except by the nervous gesture with which her fingers closed on the strings of pearls at her throat as if they were a collier de force which compressed and suffocated her.
“no one lives without desires or ends of some kind however absurd or unattainable they may be,” he said with truth. “i think you deceive yourself. i think that, without your being sensible of it, you brood so much over the past because you fancy vaguely that you will evolve some kind of future out of it, as necromancers used to stare into a crystal until they saw the future suggested on its surface. the crystal gave them nothing but what their own imagination supplied. so it is with you. your imagination makes you see in vanderlin a man who does not exist and never existed; and it also makes you fancy possible some kind of reconciliation or friendship which is as totally impossible as if you and he were both in your coffins.”
she had turned from the window and walked to and fro the room, unwilling that he should see the emotion which his blunt speech awakened in her. there was a certain truth in them which she could not wholly deny and of which she was ashamed.
“do not let us speak of these things. it is useless,” she said with impatience. “you do not understand; you are a man; how can you comprehend all that there is ineffaceable, unforgetable, for a woman in four years of the tenderest and closest union? nothing can destroy it for her. for a man it is a mere episode more or less agreeable, more or less tenacious in its hold on him; but to her——.”
she stopped abruptly: her companion looked at her with admiration and compassion mingled in equal parts, and he smiled slightly.
“my dear olga! once in a hundred years a woman is born who takes such a view as you do of love and life. they are dear to poets, and furnish the themes of the[85] most moving dramas. but they are women who invariably end miserably, either in a cloister like heloise, or in a tomb like juliet, or simply and more prosaically with tubercles on their lungs at hyères or the canaries. you know the world, or you used to know it. you must be aware that there are millions of women who in your place would have consoled themselves long ago. i want you to see the unwisdom and the uselessness of such self-sacrifice. i want you to resume your place in the world. i want you to realize that life is like the earth: there is the winter, more or less long, no doubt, but afterward there is the spring. you know that poem of sully prudhomme, in which he imagines that all the plants agree to refrain from bearing flowers a whole year. but that year has never been seen in fact. the poem is wrong artistically and scientifically.”
“of the earth, yes; but in the human soul there are many spots stricken with barrenness for ever.”
“but not at your age?”
“what has age to do with it?”
he sighed; he felt the use of argument, the futility of entreaty.
“are you not too proud a woman,” he said at length, “to sit in the dust, with ashes on your head, smitten to the ground by an unjust sentence?”
“i have told you. all my pride is dead; not for a year like sully prudhomme’s flowers, but for ever.”
“and you forgive the man who killed it?”
the blood mantled in her face.
“that is a question i cannot allow, even to you, dear ernst.”
he was silenced.
“and you are going back to the owls and the bitterns of schloss lynar?” he asked, as he took his leave of her half an hour later. “what a life for you, that swabian solitude!”
“the bitterns and owls are very good company, and at least they never offend me.”
“let me be as fortunate!” he said with a sigh. “i may return to-morrow.”
“yes, i do not leave until evening!”
[86]when he had left her she remained lost in the sadness of her own useless thoughts for some moments; then she put on a long black cloak, a veil which hid her features, and went out in the street, saying nothing to the two servants who traveled with her or to the servant of the hotel. she went out into the street and crossed the seine by the bridge of henri quatre, her elegance of form and her height making some of the passers-by pause and stare, wondering who she could be, alone, on foot, and so closely veiled. one man followed and accosted her, but he did not dare persevere.
she went straight on her way to the rue de rivoli, for she had known paris well, and loved it as we love a place which has been the seat of our happiness. it was near the end of a grey and chilly day; the lights were glittering everywhere, and the animation of a great and popular thoroughfare was at its height. the noise of traffic and the haste of crowds made her ears ache with sound, so used as she now was to the absolute silence of her swabian solitude; a silence only broken by the rush of wind or water. she approached a very large and stately building which looked like a palace blent with a prison; it was the french house of business of the great paris and berlin financiers, vanderlin et cie.
she walked toward it and past it, very slowly, whilst its electric lamps shed their rays upon her.
she passed it and turned, and passed it and turned again, and as often as she could do so without attracting attention from the throngs or from the police. there was a mingling of daylight and lamplight; above-head cumuli clouds were driven before a north wind. she waited on a mere chance; the chance of seeing one whom she had not seen for eight years pass out of a small private door to his carriage. she knew his hours, his habits; probably, she thought, they had not changed.
she was rewarded, if it could be called reward.
as she passed the façade for the eighth time, and those on guard before the building began to watch her suspiciously, she saw a tall man come out of that private doorway and cross the pavement to a coupé waiting by the curbstone. in a moment he had entered it; the door had[87] closed on him, the horses had started down the rue de rivoli.
she had seen the man who had repudiated and dishonored her; the only man she had ever loved; the father of her dead boy.
“does he ever remember?” she wondered as she turned away, and was lost amongst the crowds in the falling night.
