Sabran stretched out his fingers and took some of the violets from the Saxe bowl and fastened them in his coat as he went on speaking of the weather, of the perils of the roads whose tracks were obliterated, and of the prowess and intelligence of his horses, who had found the way home when he and his groom, a man born and bred in the Tauern, had both been utterly at a loss. The octagon-room had never looked lovelier and gayer to him, and his wife had never looked more beautiful than both did now as he came to them out of the darkness and the snowstorm and the anxiety of the last hour.
'Do not run those risks,' she murmured. 'You know all that your life is to me.'
The letter which lay burnt in the fire, and the dusky night of ice and wind without, had made him dearer to her than ever. And yet the startled, shocked sense of some mystery, of some evil, was heavy upon her, and did not leave her that evening nor for many a day after.
'You are not well?' he said to her anxiously later, as they left the dinner-table. She answered evasively.
'You know I am not always quite well now. It is nothing. It will pass.'
'I was wrong to alarm you by being out so late in such weather,' he said with self-reproach. 'I will go out earlier in future.'
'Do not wear those violets,' she said, with a trivial caprice wholly unlike her, as she took them from his coat. 'They are Bonapartist emblems—fleurs de malheur.'
He smiled, but he was surprised, for he had never seen in her any one of those fanciful whims and vagaries that are common to women.
'Give me any others instead,' he said; 'I wear but your symbol, O my lady!'
She took some myrtle and lilies of the valley from one of the large porcelain jars in the Rittersaal.