With that keen home thrust in parting he left her, giving his blessing to the kneeling household; and six white mules, always kept there in readiness for his visits, bore him away through the embrowning woods.
When he reached his palace in Buda he summoned Egon Vàsàrhely and related what had passed.
His nephew heard in silence.
'Your Eminence erred in your judgment of Wanda,' he said at length. 'She would never make her wrongs, whatever they be, public, nor seek for dissolution of her marriage. She may repent it, but she will repent it in solitude.'
'If the marriage be so sacred in her eyes,' said the angry prelate, 'let her continue to live with her husband. She has been a law to herself; she has parted from him; where is the wifely submission there? Where the sanctity of the immutable bond?'
'Perhaps some day she will bid him return,' said Vàsàrhely, whose features were very grave and pale.
'She could forget this fatal folly like a bad dream,' continued the Cardinal, unheeding. 'She could begin a new life; she could wed with you.'
'Your Eminence mistakes,' said Vàsàrhely, abruptly. 'Though that man were dead ten times over, Wanda would never wed with me—nor I with her.'
'You are both wiser than the wisdom and holier than the holiness of the Church,' said the incensed ecclesiastic, with boundless scorn. He was accustomed to bend human volition like a willow wand in his hand.
When she herself had left the terrace where she had parted from the prelate, having accompanied him there in that stately etiquette which, though she had been dying, habit would have compelled her to observe in every detail, she had turned with a sense of intolerable pain from the sunshine of the September day.