After all, were the great sorrows of life one-half so unendurable in themselves as the tiresome annoyances with which the foolish habits of men have environed them?
That our friend dies is pain enough, why must we have also the nuisance of following his funeral?
‘Men only think of themselves!’ she said irritably, in her own unconscious egotism. If Boris Seliedoff had considered her as he should have done, he would not have killed himself within three miles of her garden terrace, at a moment when all their own gossiping world was crowding on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean. A sense of the wrong done to herself divided the regret, tinged almost with remorse, which weighed on her.
As she moved through her boudoir to write the inevitable and most difficult letter which must be penned to his mother far away in the province of the Ekaterinoslaf, a photograph, in a frame of blue plush, caught her eye as it stood amongst all the pretty costly nothings of her writing-table. It was a photograph of Seliedoff; it had been tinted with an artist’s skill, and the boyish handsome mouth smiled tenderly and gaily at her.
For almost the first time in her life she felt the tears rise to her throat and eyes. She laid the picture face downward, and wept.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A few days later when the remains of Boris Seliedoff had been removed to Russia, there to find their last home in the sombre mausoleum of his family on their vast estates in Ekaterinoslaf, Geraldine, who was one of the few who were admitted to La Jacquemerille in these days of mourning, coming thither one afternoon to find her in the garden alone and to entreat for permission to follow her in the various travels which she was about to undertake, since the Riviera had grown distasteful to her, was accosted by her abruptly, if in her delicate languor she could ever be termed abrupt: