Whilst he passed along Stanhope Street into the Park his own daughter was standing in a room of a secluded and aristocratic hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain, where she had arrived that morning.
She was dressed in black, with three strings of pearls round her throat; they were the pearls she had worn on her ill-fated marriage-day. She was a woman of singular beauty; the kind of beauty which resists sorrow and time, and ennobles even the mask of death.
With her was one of her cousins, Ernst von Karstein, the only one of her family who had been faithful to her through good and evil report, who had loved her always, before her marriage and after it; but who had always known that he could look for no response from her.
“You are always well, Olga,” he was saying now. “What amulet have you?”
“I imagine,” she answered, “that my talisman consists in absolute indifference as to whether I be ill or well.”
“That is a blasphemy,” said her companion. “No one can be indifferent to health. Ill-health intensifies every other evil and saps the roots of every enjoyment.”
“Yet to lie on a sick bed, at peace with man and God, and surrounded by those we love, would that be so sad a fate?”
“You speak of what you know nothing about; you are never ill! You grow morbid, Olga. You live like a nun. You see no one. The finest mind cannot resist the morbid influences of constant solitude. Whoever your Pope is, you should ask his dispensation from such vows.”
“The law has been my Pope, and has set me free of all vows. I live thus because I do not care to live otherwise.”
“I should have thought you too proud a woman to accept excommunication in this submissive way.”