'You have done Egon none. I should not have been his wife had I never been yours.'
'Who knows?' murmured Sabran, as he followed her into the entrance hall. The stately figure of Egon Vàsàrhely enveloped in furs was just passing through the arched doorway.
She went towards him with a glad welcome and both hands outstretched.
Prince Egon bowed to the ground: then took both her hands in his and kissed her on the cheek.
Sabran, who grew very pale, advanced and greeted him with ceremonious grace.
'My wife has bade me welcome you, Prince, but it would be presumptuous in me, a stranger, to do that. All her kindred must be dear and sacred here.'
Egon Vàsàrhely, with an effort to which he had for years been vainly schooling himself, stretched out his hand to take her husband's; but as he did so, and his glance for the first time dwelt on Sabran, a look surprised and indefinitely perplexed came on his own features. Unconsciously he hesitated a moment; then, controlling himself, he replied with a few fitting words of courtesy and friendship. That there should be some embarrassment, some constraint, was almost inevitable, and did not surprise her: she saw both, but she also saw that both were hidden under the serenity of high breeding and worldly habit. The most difficult moment had passed: they went together into the Rittersaal, talked together a little on a few indifferent topics, and in a little space Prince Egon withdrew to his own apartments to change his travelling clothes. Sabran left him on the threshold of his chamber.
Vàsàrhely locked the doors, locking out even his servant, threw off his furs and sat down, leaning his head on his hands. The meeting had cost him even more than he had feared that it would do. For five years he had dreaded this moment, and its pain was as sharp and as fresh to him as though it had been unforeseen. To sleep under the same roof with the husband of Wanda von Szalras! He had overrated his power of self-control, underrated his power of suffering, when to please her he had consented after five years to visit Hohenszalras. What were five years?—half a century would not have changed him.
Under the plea of fatigue, he, who had sat in his saddle eighteen hours at a stretch, and was braced to every form of endurance in the forest chase and in the tented field, sent excuses to his host for remaining in his own rooms until the Ave Maria rung. When he at length went down to the blue-room where she was, he had recovered, outwardly at least, his tranquillity and his self-possession, though here, in this familiar, once beloved chamber, where every object had been dear to him from his boyhood, a keener trial than any he had passed through awaited him, as she led forward to meet him a little boy clad in white velvet, with a cloud of light golden hair above deep blue luminous eyes, and said to him:
'Egon, this is my Bela. You will love him a little, for my sake?'