‘What is impossible?’ said Othmar, as he entered the room and approached behind her, unseen until he had drawn her head backward and kissed her on the eyes. ‘What is impossible, my child?’ he repeated. ‘No wish of yours if you tell it to me.’
She coloured very much, and rose, and remained silent. Her heart was beating fast; she did not know what to reply. By the light of the fire he did not see how red she grew and then how pale. He seated himself in a low chair and took her by the hand.
‘What is so impossible,’ he said carelessly, ‘that you dream of it in my absence in the dark?’
‘Nothing,—at least,—I would rather not say,’ she murmured.
‘As you like,’ said Othmar. ‘You know I am not Blue Beard, my dear.’
A great longing rushed through her to tell him what the Duchesse de Vannes had said, and ask him if it were true or false—he who alone could know the secrets of his own heart,—but sensitiveness, timidity, delicacy, pride, all made her mute. What use would it be to ask him? He would never wound her with the truth if the truth were what her cousin had said.
Othmar smiled kindly as he looked at her; she did not know that if he had loved her more he would have been more curious before this, her first secret, less willingly resigned to be shut out from her confidence.
‘Who has been with you to-day?’ he asked. ‘Oh, I remember, you have had little Blanchette. What a terrible child; she is an Elzevir compendium of the century. Has she said anything to vex you? She is as malicious as Mascarille——’
Yseulte touched his hand timidly. There was a grain of fear in her adoration of him, that fear which enters into all great love, though Nadine Napraxine and Madame de Vannes would have ridiculed it as ‘jeu de lac et de nacelle,’ the ‘vieux jeu’ of the romanticists and sentimentalists.