He hesitates. "I don't know whether you will think very well of me if I tell you the truth."

"That you may be sure I shall not. No man ever behaves well where women are in the question."

"My dear Dolly, what unkind exaggeration! If I tell you anything, you will be sure not to repeat what I say? Madame Sabaroff considers me a stranger to her: I am bound to accept her decision on such a point."

"You knew her in Russia?"

"Yes; when I was there she was the new beauty at the court. She had been married a year or less to Paul Sabaroff. I had the honor of her friendship at that time; if she withdraws it now I must acquiesce."

"Oh!"

Lady Usk gives a little sound between a snort and a sigh.

She is annoyed. The gossipers are right, then. She is sorry the children have been so much with their friend, and she is infuriated at the idea of her husband's triumph over her credulity.

"Oh, pray don't think--don't think for a moment----" murmurs Gervase; but his cousin understands that it is the conventional compulsory expostulation which every man who is well-bred is bound to make on such subjects.

"She must have been very young then?" she says, beating impatiently on her blotting-book with her gold pen.

"Very young; but such a husband as Paul Sabaroff made is--well, a more than liberal education to any woman, however young. She was sixteen, I think, and very lovely; though she is perhaps handsomer now. I had the honor of her confidence: she was unhappy and _incomprise_; her father had given her hand in discharge of a debt at cards; Sabaroff was a gambler and a brute; at the end of the second winter season he had a violent fit of jealousy, and sent her to his estate on the White Sea----"

"Jealousy of you?"

Gervase bowed.

"Where she was kept in a state of surveillance scarcely better than absolute imprisonment. I did all manner of crazy and romantic things to endeavor to see her; and once or twice I succeeded; but he had discovered letters of mine, and made her captivity more rigorous than ever. I myself was ordered on the special mission to Spain,--you remember,--and I left Russia with a broken heart. From that time to this I have never seen her."

"But your broken heart has continued to do its daily work?"

"It is a figure of speech. I adored her, and the husband was a brute.

When l.u.s.toff shot him he only rid the world of a brute. You have seen that broad bracelet she wears above the right elbow? People always talk so about it. She wears it to hide where Sabaroff broke her arm one night in his violence: the marks of it are there forever."

Lady Usk is silent: she is divided between her natural compa.s.sion and sympathy, which are very easily roused, and her irritation at discovering that her new favorite is what Usk would call "just like all the rest of them."

"You perceive," he added, "that, as the princess chooses wholly to ignore the past, it is not for me to recall it. I am obliged to accept her decision, however much I must suffer from it."

"Suffer!" echoes his cousin. "After her husband's death you never took the trouble to cross Europe to see her."

"She had never answered my letters," says Gervase, but he feels that the excuse is a frail one. And how, he thinks, angrily, should a good woman like his cousin, who has never flirted in her life and never done anything which might not have been printed in the daily papers, understand a man's inevitable inconstancy?

"I a.s.sure you that I have never loved any woman as I loved her," he continues.

"Then you are another proof, if one were wanted, that men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for----"

"I did not die, certainly," Gervase says, much irritated; "but I suffered greatly, whether you choose to believe it or not."

"I am not inclined to believe it," replies his hostess. "It is not your style."

"I wrote to her a great many times."

He pauses.

Lady Usk fills up the pause. "And she answered you?" she inquires.

"N-no," replies Gervase, unwilling to confess such an affront to him.

"She did not write. Prudence, I suppose; or perhaps she might be too closely watched, or her letters might be stopped: who can say?"

"n.o.body but herself, clearly. Well?"

"I was sent to Madrid; and I heard nothing of her except that Sabaroff was shot in a duel about her with l.u.s.toff; but that was two years afterwards."

"And when he was shot why did you not in due course go to the White Sea, or wherever she was, and offer yourself?"

"The truth is, I had become acquainted with a Spanish lady----"

"A great many Spanish ladies, no doubt! What a half-hearted Lothario!"

"Not at all. Only just at that time----"

"Manillas, mandolines, balconies, bull-fights, high ma.s.s, and moonlight had the supremacy! My dear Alan, tell your story how you will, you can't make yourself heroic."

"I have not the smallest pretension to do so," says Gervase, very much annoyed. "I have no heroism. I leave it to Lord Brandolin, who has been shipwrecked five hundred times, I believe, and ridden as many dromedaries over unknown sand-plains as Gordon----"

"As you don't care in the least for her, why should you care if his shipwrecks and his dromedaries interest her? We don't know that they do; but----"

"How little sympathy you have!"

"George says I have always a great deal too much. What do you want me to sympathize with? According to your own story, you 'loved and rode away;'

at least, took a through-ticket across Europe, as Lovelace has to do in these prosaic days. If you did not go back to Russia when you might have gone back, _a qui la faute_? n.o.body's but your own and the nameless Spanish lady or ladies'!"

"You are very perverse."

"It is you who are, or who were, perverse. According to your own story, you adored a woman when she was unattainable; when she became attainable you did not even take the trouble to get into a railway-carriage: you were otherwise amused. What romantic element is there in such a tale as yours to excite the smallest fragment of interest? To judge you out of your own mouth, you seem to me to have behaved with most uninteresting inconstancy."

"It was four years, and she had never answered my letters."

"Really a reason to make you esteem her infinitely more than if she had answered them. My dear Alan, you were a flirt, and you forgot as flirts forget: why should one pity you for being so easily consoled? You ought to be infinitely grateful that Madame Sabaroff did not send you reams of reproaches, and telegraph you compromising messages which would have got you into trouble in Downing Street. The thing died a natural death; you did not care to keep it alive: why are you now all lamentations over its grave? I really do not follow the course of your emotions,--if you feel any emotion: I thought you never did. Madame Sabaroff has never been a person difficult to follow or to find; the fashionable intelligence of the newspapers would at any time have enabled you to know where she was; you never had inclination or remembrance enough to make you curious to see her again, and then when you come across her in a country house you think yourself very ill used because she does not all at once fall into your arms. You couldn't possibly care about her, since you never tried to see her all those years!"

Dorothy Usk is really annoyed.

She is not a person who has a high standard of humanity at any time, and she knows men thoroughly, and they have no chance of being heroes in her sight. But she likes a man to be a man, and to be an ardent lover if he be a lover at all, and her favorite cousin seems to her to wear a poor aspect in this page of his autobiography.

"Pray, did you know that she is as rich as she is?" she asks, with some sharpness in her tone.

Gervase colors a little, being conscious that his response cannot increase his cousin's sympathies with him.

"No. Is she rich? Paul Sabaroff was poor. He had gambled away nearly everything. Your children have a great deal of _blague_ about her riches; but I suppose it is all nonsense."

"Not nonsense at all. Two years ago some silver was discovered on a bit of rough land which belonged to her, somewhere beyond the Urals, I think, and she is enormously rich,--will be richer every year, they say."