But Olga made no reply. Silent, impassive, stricken through and through, she sat with blanched face and tightly clasped hands; and the sun shone, and the bells rang, and the populace shouted: "Long live the Tsar! Long live our little father!" but she neither saw nor heard any of it. All her heart and soul were in revolt and turmoil; all she had trusted to had gone down before her eyes, she was shipwrecked upon an ocean of deception and despair.
Presently the shouts and cries grew fainter, and the horses slackened speed as they turned into the Palace gates and were drawn up sharply at the side entrance, out of which she had passed so long ago—was it months or years, or alas! only hours? Should she ever again know what it was to feel light-hearted and joyous? Would this terrible burden of knowledge ever be lifted from her heart?
Ivor Tolskoi sprang down even as the threshold was reached and put out his arm to help her; she barely touched it with her gloved hand, and passed by him with but one burning look from her haunted eyes. For days after, the light pressure of her fingers rested there like iron, and the misery of her glance accompanied him as that of a lost spirit.
CHAPTER V.
MIMI'S BIRTHDAY POSY.
George Newbold's birthday fell within the first week of May, and certainly no more ideal spring morning could have dawned than that which Esther had set apart to be especially celebrated in honour of her spouse.
Mr. Newbold should, indeed, for the fitness of things, have been a young and blooming maiden—rather than a man verging towards middle age, and more or less disillusionised—to correspond with the rare loveliness and freshness of creation, that sprang afresh to life as Aurora, with blushing finger-tips, drew back the curtains of the night, and ushered in the roseate dawn. Even as the surroundings belonged more to that "garden of fair delights," consecrated by the Egyptians to Daphne, into which naught but harmony and sensuous peace and pleasure was allowed to enter, rather than to
"This live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Between the mirrors of its drawing-rooms
Than Roland with his knights at Roncevalles."
But Nature is ever prodigal and unreasoning; she stops not to consider on whom to spend her largesse, she has no calculation in her giving, and she seeks no return, since, with her keen perceptiveness, she knows we mortals possess nothing of our own, no gift of jewel or of price, of intellect or of beauty, that can compare with the least of those benefits she pours with such lavish hand upon us.