“Let us ask God to give him his very best gifts, Henri.”
“Ay, if only we knew what they are.”
“We do know, brother,—love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.”
Henri started, as though the thought were new to him. “Those would be strange jewels for the diadem on a monarch’s brow,” he said. “Yet, after all, the world—here in Paris as well as where I have been in Poland—can bear witness to ‘long-suffering, gentleness, goodness.’ Of ‘love, joy, peace,’ of course I cannot speak, for they are gems whose light is turned God-wards.”
“Then let our prayer be for those. The face we have seen to-day does not look joyful, Henri.”
When they returned to the house they found guests awaiting them, friends of Madame de Salgues, who wished to congratulate her niece upon the return of Henri, and to make his acquaintance. The afternoon was spent in entertaining them, and was already far gone when Ivan joined the party. Madame de Talmont contrived to say a word to him in private, which sent him with a beaming face to answer M. de Cranfort’s multitudinous questions about the Dresden campaign.
By-and-by, when the soft May twilight had fallen, he stole to the window where Clémence was standing looking out on the little garden. She had wearied of the discussion absorbing all the others, about the time and manner of the new king’s triumphal entry into his capital. Ivan in his heart thanked the quick, eager voices which were making just then a welcome “solitude for two.”
“Mademoiselle Clémence,” he began.
A thrill of terror swept over the girl’s heart, like the instinctive shrinking of the sensitive plant which closes up its petals at the lightest touch. She took refuge, not in silence, but in speech. “Monsieur Ivan,” she said quickly, “I have seen your Czar.”
“Have you?”