‘Now and then. There is no one else to sing. But my cousin does not approve of it. She thinks there may be people over from Nice; but there never are. There is no one but the peasants.’
‘The Duchesse will not mind me,’ said Othmar. ‘Let us say au revoir!’
He kissed her hand with a careless gallantry which made her colour over her brow and throat, and let her leave him. She sped like a frightened fawn over the turf and was soon lost to sight in the bosquets of Millo.
Othmar strolled back to the house.
‘Au tombeau seul finit ma voie obscure,’
he repeated to himself as he looked after her; the pathos of her destiny gave her a spirituality and a sanctity in his sight, and the song of the blind child and its young singer for a few moments disputed a place in his memory with the vision of Nadine Napraxine as she had plucked the tea-roses on his terrace to let them fall.
‘That young girl would not let a rose fade,’ he thought, ‘and her own roses are to wither between convent walls! What arbitrary caprices has Fate! If they would only let me give her a million——’
But they would not even have let him give her orchids and camellias had they known it.