"Waldemar, how can you say so!" put in the young Countess.
"Is the idea new to you?" he said, looking up with a frown. "I should have thought any third person must see how I stand with my mother. She forces herself to be friendly to me--oh yes!--and it must cost her trouble enough at times; but she can't overcome her secret dislike any more than I can mine--so we have nothing to reproach one another with."
Wanda was silent, embarrassed, and greatly surprised at the turn the conversation had taken. Waldemar did not appear to notice this; he went on in a hard voice--
"The Princess Baratowska is, and always will be, a stranger to me. I do not belong to her or to her son. I feel that every time we meet. You have no idea, Wanda, what it costs me to cross that threshold continually, to be constantly with them. It is a positive torture I impose on myself, and I should never have thought I could bear it so patiently."
"But what do you do it for?" asked Wanda, imprudently. "Nobody forces you to come."
He looked at her, and the answer lay in his eyes--shone in them so distinctly that the young girl blushed to her very forehead. That ardent, reproachful gaze spoke all too plainly.
"You do my aunt injustice," she said, speaking quickly, as if to hide her embarrassment. "She must, and does, love her own son."
"Oh, no doubt!" Waldemar's bitterness had now grown quite beyond his control. "I am persuaded that she loves Leo very much, though she is so severe with him; but why should she love me, or I her? I was hardly a year old when I lost father and mother at one stroke. I was torn from my home to be brought up among strangers. When, later on, I came to reflect, to ask questions, I learned that my parents' marriage had been an unhappy one--a misfortune for both of them--and that they had separated in bitter hatred; and I learned, too, how this hatred had survived the grave, and how it exerted an influence on my own life. They told me that my mother had been to blame for all; and yet I heard many an allusion to my father, many an expression used with regard to him, which disturbed my judgment of him also. Where other children are taught to love and respect, suspicion and distrust were instilled into me--and now I cannot get free from them. My uncle has been good to me; he is fond of me in his way, but he could not offer me anything beyond the life he leads himself. You know pretty well what that is--I think every one in my mother's house is well posted up on that subject--and yet, Wanda, you expect me to have some feeling for the poetical!"
He spoke almost resentfully, and yet there was a sort of low, regretful sadness in his words. Wanda looked up at her companion with great astonished eyes. She could hardly recognise him to-day. It was the first time she had ever had any serious conversation with him, the first time he had departed from his shy monosyllabic reserve. The peculiarly cold relations between the mother and son had not escaped her; but she had not believed the latter to be in any way affected by the existing estrangement. He had never alluded to the situation by a word; and now, all at once, he showed himself to be most keenly alive to, and deeply wounded by it. Now, in this hour, there dawned on the girl's mind some dim notion of what Waldemar's youth had been--how empty, lonely, and desolate, and how friendless and neglected the young heir whose riches she had so often heard extolled.
"You wanted to see the sunset," said Waldemar, suddenly changing the subject and speaking in quite a different tone, as he rose and came to her side. "I think we are having a rare one to-day."