Court dress became him, and his great height and elegance of manner made him noticeable even in that brilliant crowd of notables. All the greatest ladies distinguished him with their smiles, but he gave them no more than courtesy. He saw only before the 'eye of memory' his wife as he had seen her at the last court ball, with the famous pearls about her throat, and her train of silver tissue sown with pearls and looped up with white lilac.
'It is the flower I like best,' she had said to him. 'It brought me your first love-message in Paris, do you remember? It said little; it was very discreet, but it said enough!'
'You are always thinking of Wanda!' said the Countess Brancka to him now, with a tinge of impatience in her tone.
He coloured a little, and said with that hauteur with which he always repressed any passing jest at his love for his wife:
'When both one's duty and joy point the same way it is easy to follow them in thought.'
'I hope you follow them in action too,' said Mdme. Brancka.
'If I do not, I am at least only responsible to Wanda.'
'Who would be a lenient judge you mean? said the Countess, with a certain smile that displeased him. 'Do not be too sure; she is a von Szalras. They are not agreeable persons when they are angered.'
'I have not been so unhappy as to see her so,' said Sabran coldly, with a vague sense of uneasiness. As much as it is possible for a man to dislike a woman who is very lovely, and young enough to be still charming in the eyes of the world, he disliked Olga Brancka. He had known her for many years in Paris, not intimately, but by force of being in the same society, and, like many men who do not lead very decent lives themselves, he frankly detested cocodettes.
'If we want these manners we have our lionnes,' he was wont to say, at a time when Cochonette was seen every day behind his horses by the Cascade, and it had been the height of the Countess Olga's ambition at that time to be called like Cochonette. A certain resemblance there was between the great lady and the wicked one; they had the same small delicate sarcastic features, the same red gold curls, the same perfect colourless complexion; but where Cochonette had eyes of the slightest blue, the wife of Count Stefan had the luminous piercing black eyes of the Muscovite physiognomy. Still the likeness was there, and it made the sight of Mdme. Brancka distasteful to him, since his memories of the other were far from welcome. It was for Cochonette that he had broken the bank at Monte Carlo, and into her lap that he had thrown all the gold rouleaux at a time when in his soul he had already adored Wanda von Szalras, and had despised himself for returning to the slough of his old pleasures. It was Cochonette who had sold his secrets to the Prussians, and brought them down upon him in the farmhouse amongst the orchards of the Orléannais, whilst she passed safely through, the German lines and across the frontier, laden with her jewels and her valeurs of all kinds, saying in her teeth as she went: 'He will never see that Austrian woman again!' That had been the end of all he had known of Cochonette, and a presentiment of perfidy, of danger, of animosity always came over him whenever he saw the joli petit minois which in profile was so like Cochonette's, looking up from under the loose auburn curls that Mdme. Olga had copied from her.