He rose and walked to the hearth. He, whose life was a long lie, never lied to her if he could avoid it; and he knew very well that he did miss the world with all its folly, stimulant, and sin. Sometimes the moral air here seemed to him too pure, too clear.
'Did I do so I should be thankless indeed—thankless as madmen are who do not know the good done to them. I am like a ship that has anchored in a fair haven after press of weather. I infinitely prefer to see none but yourself: when others are here we are of necessity so much apart. If the weather,' he added more lightly, 'did not so very often wear Milton's grey sandals, there would be nothing one could ever wish changed in the life here. For such great riders as we are, that is a matter of regret. Wet saddles are too often our fate, but in compensation our forests are so green.'
She did not press the question.
But the next day she wrote a letter to a relative who was a great minister and had preponderating influence in the council chamber of the Austrian Empire. She did not speak to Sabran of the letter that she sent.
She had not known any of that disillusion which befalls most women in their love. Her husband had remained her lover, passionately, ardently, jealously; and the sincerity of his devotion to her had spared her all that terrible consciousness of the man's satiety which usually confronts a woman in the earliest years of union. She shrank now with horror from the fear which came to her that this passion might, like so many others, alter and fade under the dulness of habit. She had high courage and clear vision; she met half-way the evil that she dreaded.
In the spring a Foreign Office despatch from Vienna came to him and surprised and moved him strongly. With it in his hand he sought her at once.
'You did this!' he said quickly. 'They offer me the Russian mission.'
She grew a little pale, but had courage to smile. She had seen by a glance at his face the pleasure the offer gave him.
'I only told my cousin Kunst that I thought you might be persuaded to try public life, if he proposed it to you.'
'When did you say that?'