The child walks silently and shyly beside her, his happy vanity troubled for once by the sense that he has made some mistake, and that there are some few things still in the universe which he does not quite entirely understand.
"You are not angry?" he asks her, at last, with a vague terror in his gay and impudent little soul.
"Angry with you?" says Xenia Sabaroff. "My dear child, no. I am perhaps angry with myself,—myself of many years ago."
The Babe is silent: he does not venture to ask any more, and he has a humiliating feeling that he is not first in the thoughts of Madame Sabaroff,—nay, that, though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon his shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten him.
Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her great charm for him consists in the power she possesses of compelling him to control his impulses. He walks away by himself through the green shadows of the boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. He is fully aware that he has done a rash, perhaps an utterly unwise, thing in putting his future into the hands of a woman of whom he knows so little, and has, perhaps, the right to suspect so much. Yet he does not repent.
He does not see her again before dinner. She does not come into the library at the tea-hour; there is a large dinner that night; county people are there, as well as the house-party. He has to take in a stupid woman, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, who thinks him the most absent-minded and unpleasant person she has ever known, and wonders how he has got his reputation as a wit. He is so seated that he cannot even see Xenia Sabaroff, and he chafes and frets throughout the dinner, from the bisque soup to the caviare biscuit, and thinks what an idiotic thing the habits of society have made of human life.
When he is fairly at rare intervals goaded into speech, he utters paradoxes, and suggests views so startling that the wife of the Lord-Lieutenant is scandalized, and thinks the lunacy laws are defective if they cannot include and incarcerate him. She feels sure that the rumor about the Hindoo women at St. Hubert's Lea is entirely true.
After dinner he is free to approach the lady of his thoughts, but he endeavors in vain to tell from her face what answer he will receive, what time and meditation may have done or undone for him. She avoids the interrogation of his eyes, and is surrounded by other men as usual.
The evening seems to him intolerably long and intolerably tedious. It is, however, for others very gay. There is an improvised dance, ending in an impromptu cotillion, and following on an act of a comic opera given with admirable spirit by Lady Dawlish, Mrs. Curzon, and some of the younger men. Every one is amused, but the hours seem very slow to him: Gervase scarcely leaves her side at all, and Brandolin, with all his chivalrous refusal and unchanging resolution to allow no shadow of doubt to steal over him, feels the odious whispers he has heard and the outspoken words of Litroff recur to his memory and weigh on him like the incubus of a nightmare. With a sensation of dread, he realizes that it is possible, do what he may, that they may haunt him so all his life. A man may be always master of his acts, but scarcely always of his thoughts.
"But I will never ask her one syllable," he thinks, "and I will marry her to-morrow if she chooses."