He had grown very wearisome, he had been even disposed to become exacting, he had wearied her, and she had not known very well how to get rid of him; but still it was a pity. He had had a great position, he was an only son, his own people were very fond of him, he was better than most of the men of his age and rank; she had for once the sensation that one feels when one has broken a rare piece of china,—the sensation of having done a silly thing, an irreparable thing.
‘I never told him to go to Canada!’ she said to herself. No: she had only told him that he wearied her. So he had wearied her; he had never been too amusing at the best of times. It was not her fault that he had become tiresome; they all became so; they had no originality. Still it was a pity; she saw his fair frank face, with its eyes so blue and so wistful, looking at her as he had stood to hear his sentence that last day we saw La Jacquemerille.
‘I do not think I said anything unkind to him that day,’ she reflected; and then the little smile that was so often on her lips came on them a moment as she thought: ‘To be sure, I told him to marry somebody—anybody.’
Well, he was dead, and before he was thirty; with all his courage and gallantry and wealth, and the many people who loved him at home all powerless to save him from the black chasm of the yawning ice; and she was not so very sorry after all; she honestly wished she could feel more sorrow. She had never known real sorrow but once, when her father had been found dead in his writing-room in the Embassy at Vienna.
‘Platon will be more sorry,’ she thought, ‘he always likes his worst enemies so much!’
Then she rang again for Paul, and told him to take the telegram to the Prince if he was still in the house.
Napraxine, in five minutes’ time, not venturing to return in person, wrote to her on the back of the printed message:
‘I am grieved indeed. Would you desire to postpone the dinner of to-night?’
She wrote back to him: