'That is the Stanhopea tigrina,' said Herr Greswold, touching one with reverent fingers; 'they are all very rare. It is a welcome worthy of you, my lady.'
'A very extravagant one,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a certain displeasure that mingled with a softened emotion. 'Who brought it?'
'The Marquis de Sabran, by extra-poste, himself this morning,' answered Hubert—an answer she did not expect. 'But he would not wait; he would not even take a glass of tokayer, or let his horses stay for a feed of corn.'
'What knight-errantry!' said the Princess well pleased.
'What folly!' said Wanda, but she had the basket of orchids taken to her own octagon room.
It seemed as if he had divined how much of late she had thought of him. She was touched, and yet she was angered a little.
'Surely she will write to him,' thought the Princess wistfully very often: but she did not write. To a very proud woman the dawning consciousness of love is always an irritation, an offence, a failure, a weakness: the mistress of Hohenszalras could not quickly pardon herself for taking with pleasure the message of the orchids.
A little while later she received a letter from Olga Brancka. In it she wrote from Paris:
'Parsifal is doing wonders in the Chamber, that is, he is making Paris talk; his party will forbid him doing anything else. You certainly worked a miracle. I hear he never plays, never looks at an actress, never does anything wrong, and when a grand heiress was offered to him by her people refused her hand blandly but firmly. What is one to think? That he washed his soul white in the Szalrassee?'
It was the subtlest flattery of all, the only flattery to which she would have been accessible, this entire alteration in the current of a man's whole life; this change in habit, inclination, temper, and circumstance. If he had approached her its charm would have been weakened, its motive suspected; but aloof and silent as he remained, his abandonment of all old ways, his adoption of a sterner and worthier career, moved her with its marked, mute homage of herself.