'I don't know what you hope for,' replied the girl, slowly, as if she were choosing her words; but she hardly knew what she said, she was lost in a multitude of dreams, and her words but filled in the rare crevices between them. 'I thought that every man carried his own fate in his own hand.'
'A man can fight the tangible, but no man can struggle against the ordinary laws of social life. We may laugh at conventional methods, but even in Révonde there are some which must be yielded to.'
'I don't think,' said Valerie, 'we yield to many in Révonde.'
Rallywood saw a group of people advancing towards them. Valerie, with her changes of mood and manner, distracted him, and drove him on to say what he had resolved never to be tempted into saying.
'I am a soldier—only a soldier; I gain a livelihood, but no more. I have no luck and no genius. To make a fortune or a name is beyond me. And without fortune many desirable things are impossible.'
Valerie turned upon him a bewildering smile.
'I shall know for the future, Captain Rallywood, what you are thinking of. You will be thinking, for all those grave eyes of yours, of the fortune you cannot make!'
'Not quite that, Mademoiselle,' he answered, 'I shall be thinking of the girl I cannot win.'
Valerie found herself drawn away from him by the passing group. She was aware of a warm throb at her heart, she was trembling a little, and the fear of the morning had temporarily vanished. For no definite reason which she could afterwards discover, she felt suddenly happy.
By evening the tsa had blown away the snow-clouds for the time, and a thin moon gleamed fitfully over the wide expanses of white. Remote, muffled in leagues of snow, and alive with hungry passions and unscrupulous strength, the Castle of Sagan did not, on that wild January night, offer desirable housing to the Grand Duke of Maäsau. He had yet some thirty hours to spend as his cousin's guest before he could return to his capital without showing suspicion or giving offence. A hundred times he wished himself back in his great palace by the river bank where the squadrons of the Guard lay within call. But he bore himself well notwithstanding, and although, on the plea of chill and fatigue, he kept to his rooms more than usual, his short appearances in public left in one sense nothing to be desired. He did not carry himself as a man in mortal anxiety, but was as dissatisfied, as discourteous, and as disagreeable as it was his custom to be.