“Did I redeem my promise?”
Wilfrid assented.
The Princess’s colour deepened. She longed to deny the action attributed to her, and yet—and yet—the story brought with it a certain relief to her perplexed mind. With drooping eyes, and speaking in a low tone, she said:—
“I am glad you have told me this. It seems to settle a—a certain question. Seeing that I must be twenty-three or twenty-four years old, Pauline has—we have both—been wondering whether—you must not smile—whether ... I ... am ... married. And now I think I know. Were I a wife, a true wife, I could not have acted as you say I did.”
Wilfrid thought this reasoning just, and was very glad to think it such.
“You speak,” he smiled, “as if a husband would be a calamity.”
“He might be—in present circumstances. You forget there are two Maries, the old and the new. The new, through no fault of her own, may turn her face from what the old one liked. Would it not be dreadful to be claimed as wife by a man whose appearance, in my present state of mind, might fill me with aversion? And I ... I ... kissed ... you? We were alone, I trust?”
“Humph! I regret to say that in the very act we were surprised by no less a dignitary than the Czar, who, for reasons best known to himself, appears to have been playing the spy.”
Here Wilfrid proceeded to relate how he had been challenged by the Czar, and how the duel had been averted by Pauline’s action; and to every part of the story Marie listened in wonder mingled with regret that she should have been the cause, however unwitting, of such trouble to Wilfrid.