Frau von Sigmundskron, in whom enforced economy had developed an unusual facility for mental arithmetic, could not refrain from making a quick calculation. Forty-eight from eighty-eight, forty—a young thing, perhaps ten—ten and forty, fifty. Clara was virtually admitting that she was fifty, and if she owned to that, she must be nearer sixty. In other words, she must have been well over thirty when she had married Greifenstein. She was certainly wonderfully well preserved. And yet Greifenstein had more than once told his cousin that he had married his wife when she was a widow five and twenty years of age. This was the first occasion upon which Clara had ever let fall a word which could serve as a starting-point in the calculation, and though the baroness was the best and kindest of mortals she would not have been a woman if she had failed to notice the statement, or to draw from it such conclusions as it offered to her ingenuity.
‘The people who profit by the pardon will be old men,’ she remarked.
‘Old?’ repeated Clara with a scarcely perceptible start. ‘Not so very. They may be less than sixty—a man of sixty is still young at that age. I wonder whether any of them will profit by the permission to return. What do you think, Therese?’
The question was asked with every show of interest, and the baroness raised her quiet eyes from her work. She and Clara very rarely called each other by their first names. They generally avoided the difficulty by a plentiful use of the convenient designation of cousin. Frau von Greifenstein evidently meant to be more than usually confidential, and her companion wondered what was coming, and began to feel nervous.
‘Really,’ she answered, ‘I do not know. I suppose that a man who has been expelled from his country and exiled for many years, would naturally take the first opportunity of returning. I should think it probable. On the other hand—’ she stopped a moment, to smooth a stitch in her work.
‘On the other hand?’ repeated Clara anxiously.
‘Well, I was going to say that in forty years, a man might learn to love an adopted country as well as his own, and might prefer to stay there. It would depend upon the man, upon his character, his tastes, perhaps upon whether he had gone into the revolution out of mistaken patriotism, or out of personal ambition.’
‘Do you think so? Why?’ Frau von Greifenstein seemed deeply interested.
‘Because I fancy that a patriot would come back at any rate. His love of his country would be the strongest element in his nature. An ambitious man would either have found a field for his ambition elsewhere in forty years, or the passion would have died a natural death by that time.’
‘Ah yes! There is truth in that! But what a dreadfully extraordinary position!’ she exclaimed, with one of her unexpected bursts of laughter. ‘What a novel! Do you not see it! Oh, if I were only a novelist, what a plot I could make out of that! Dearest cousin, is it not time to have coffee?’