‘I dare say I should have been tired of him in six months,’ she thought, ‘and very likely we should have hated one another in another six. He would not have been as easy as Platon; he would have had his prejudices——’
Before her mind there rose the vision of a place she had once seen as she had sailed in a yacht down the Adriatic one cool autumnal month; a place not far from Ragusa, somewhat farther to the southward; a fantastic pile, half Greek, half Turkish, with an old Gothic keep built by Quattrocentisto Venetians rising in its midst; gardens of palms and woods of ilex sloping from it to meet the lapis-lazuli-hued sea, cliffs of all the colours of precious stones towering up behind it into the white clouds and the dazzling sunshine. Fascinated by the aspect of the place, she had asked its name and owner, and the Austrians with her had answered her, ‘It is called Zama, and it belongs to the Othmars.’
She had often remembered the Herzegovinian castle, lonely as Miramar after the tragedy of Quetaro.
‘I would not have lived at Amyôt, but at Zama,’ she thought now; then, angry and impatient of herself, she dismissed her fancies as you banish with a light clap of your hands a flock of importunate birds, which fly away as fast as they have come.
CHAPTER XXIX.
‘Are you very happy?’ said Baron Fritz to Yseulte in his occasional visits to Amyôt. And she answered without words, with a blush and a smile which were much warmer than words. He saw that she was perfectly happy, as yet; that whatever thorns might be beneath the nuptial couch, they had not touched her.
He did not venture to put the same question to Othmar. There were times when he would no more have interrogated his nephew than he would have put fire to a pile of powder; he had at once the vague fear and the abundant contempt which a thoroughly practical, artificial, and worldly man has for one whose dreams and desires are wholly unintelligible to him.