'She has quite sufficient income for her wants; I believe they are very simple.'
He spoke impatiently and rose. Rosselin, whose tact was always of the acutest kind, understood the hint and changed the subject.
Left to himself, the anger of Othmar soon grew less, and the courtesy of his nature made him regret his impatience with a man double his years and not his equal in station; one, moreover, who had only spoken honestly thoughts which were blameless.
The suggestion had annoyed him both by what it asked, which seemed to him difficult, and by what it implied, which seemed to him offensive. And he repented of his manner of receiving it, and of wounding a person who had warmly answered to his own appeal, and had aided him in regard to Damaris with a sympathy the more noteworthy because it had at first been reluctantly given. Before night he wrote a brief note to Rosselin:
'I regret my impatience, and apologise for it. No doubt you are right in your views. If I can see my way to comply with them I will do so. Meanwhile, believe in my friendship and my high esteem.'
He signed the few lines, and sent them by a messenger to Asnières.
When Rosselin received them he was sitting by his solitary lamp examining the condition of a much injured copy on vellum of 'The Birds,' which he had picked up at a bookstall on one of the quays the day before. He put the manuscript down, and read the note with its clear signature of Othmar at the end.
'A graceful amende,' he thought. 'He has a heart of gold, but his judgment is not so much to be trusted as his feelings are. He spoke of his wife's indifference. What could he expect? You cannot get out of a nature what it has not got in it. For five-and-twenty years she had lived for herself: did he suppose that all in a moment she would forget herself and live for him? I daresay he did. He was ready to live for her. That sort of mistake is so often made; and it is always the highest nature which makes it.'
Rosselin lost interest in his Aristophanes for that night. He had a foreboding of some evil. Imaginative minds are like the birds: they know when storms approach.