“I love you. What is there so strange in that? I told you so six months ago.”
She threw her arm round a young pine stem near her, and, leaning her forehead on its rough bark, burst into tears.
“Lead me, guide me, take me if you will,” she said brokenly. “I have trusted to my own wisdom, and perhaps I have always done wrong.”
CHAPTER XLVIII.
The château of Les Mouettes was lent for the coming winter season to the Prince and Princess Woffram of Karstein by its owners, who, both naturally generous, and made more generous still by happiness and a sense of gratitude, were unceasing and inexhaustible in the wideness of their goodwill. It was always well to oblige persons who are led away by their feelings, thought the recipient of their bounties. Such people do not inquire too minutely or measure too exactly. It is of such as these that is made that succulent oyster which the wise man or woman opens with his or her knife, and sucks the juices thereof.
Mouse had fully persuaded herself that she had done an admirable action. She had made two people happy; if their happiness were idiotic, and to her incomprehensible, it was none the less to them what their hearts desired: no one can account for the tastes of others.
She really admired herself and quite succeeded in forgetting whatever there might have been a little questionable or a little disagreeable to explain about her visit to Prince Khris on his deathbed. The documents had all been quite genuine; if she had embroidered a little on the plain facts of how she had obtained them, that mattered to nobody. Neither Vanderlin nor Olga ever doubted her narrative, and their gratitude toward her found incessant expression. If Prince Woffram doubted it he never said so. He had accepted its results, and his lips were sealed.
She was standing on the sea-wall of the Mouettes on a bright and balmy morning, looking herself as radiant as the morning, with a great bunch of tea-roses at her breast, and a gold-headed cane in her hand, when Daddy Gwyllian, who was staying at Cannes, came to her from the garden side of the sea-terrace.
He was looking brimful of news and of amazement; a white cashmere neckerchief was wound about his throat; he was wearing a fur coat and little bunch of fresias at the buttonhole of it; he was visibly agitated.
“My dear Princess!” he said, pressing her hands and quite forgetting that he disliked her. “What you must suffer! How I sympathize! Who could ever have thought it! A man of such sense! Perhaps if you had not left England it would not have happened!”