Venice lay before them, gray and shadowy, a reflection of the pale summer sky, whence the sun had long disappeared, and where the stars were not yet visible.
They reached the hotel, and the old Countess looked up at Erika's windows. "She is not in her boudoir," she said to herself. "Perhaps she is asleep."
"Tell Countess Erika how stupid the fête was, thanks to her absence," the young Austrian said as he took his leave, "and how we all anathematized that headache for depriving us of her society. I shall call to-morrow, and hope to find her quite well again."
He kissed the old lady's hand, and she hurried upstairs to her rooms. She softly entered Erika's apartments. The boudoir was dark, as she had seen from below. She gently opened the door of the bedroom; that was dark also. Had the poor child gone to bed? She approached the bed very softly, not to disturb her, and stooped above it. There was no one there.
A foreboding of something terrible instantly took possession of her. For a moment she lost her head: she grew dizzy, and would have screamed and alarmed the house, but her voice died in her throat. Suddenly something fluttered down from the table upon which she leaned to support herself. She stooped to pick it up: it was a letter. She turned on the electric light and read it through. After the first few lines, half blind with grief, she would have tossed it aside,--what could it contain that she did not now know?--but at last she read it through, read every word to the very end, feeding her pain with each tender, loving expression of the unhappy, mistaken girl.
Not for one moment did she blame Erika for what had happened: she blamed herself alone. She accused herself of plunging Erika into wretchedness, as years before she had done with her daughter-in-law. She had required of both of them that they should accede to her materialistic views. She had never allowed them to entertain any idealistic conception of life. She had never understood that such idealism was a necessity of their existence, and that if deprived of it in one shape they would take refuge in some exaggeration which might shield them from a life of coldly-calculating egotism. Her daughter-in-law's unhappiness had not affected her much; her grand-daughter's misery would blot the sun from her sky.
She was so clear-sighted: ah, why was she so, when she could see nothing but what agonized her?
For a creature like Erika it was as impossible to disregard the dictates of morality as it would be to breathe in the moon with lungs constructed for the atmosphere of the earth.
There were women capable of braving the opinions of the world and of quietly going on their way, women for whom the pillory was converted into a pedestal as soon as they stood in it. But Erika was not one of these. Before the stars in their courses had twice appeared in the heavens she would writhe in misery. She had none of that self-exalting quality which must veil the moral lack of which she would surely be made conscious. Yes, she would then find no other name for the sacrifice she had made to the wretch who had been willing to receive it at her hands than the one which the world has given to it for centuries when it has been made to men by worthless women, inspired by no lofty desire. In her own eyes she would be a fallen woman.
The moisture stood upon the old Countess's forehead. "My Erika! my proud, glorious Erika!" she murmured. She knew that the peril of a woman's fall must be measured by the moral height from which she falls. And Erika had fallen from a very lofty height. Her life was ruined.