'I must disobey even your wishes in the Ides of March.'
'But whether in March or July—why do you never go yourself?'
'There is nothing to go there for,' he answered, almost losing his patience; 'a people to whom I am only a name, a strip of shore on which I only own a few wind-tormented oak-trees!'
'Only imagine the duties that Wanda would evolve in your place out of those people and those oaks!'
'I have not Wanda's virtues,' he said, half sadly, half jestingly.
'We have none of us, or the Millennium would have arrived. I cannot understand your dislike to your melancholy sea-shore. Most of your countrymen are for ever home-sick away from their landes and their dolmen. You seem to feel no throb for the mater patria, even when listening to Dinorah, which sets every other Breton's heart beating.'
'My heart is Austrian,' said Sabran, with a bow towards his wife.
'That is very pretty, and what you are also obliged to say,' interrupted Madame Brancka. 'But why hate Romaris? For my part, I believe you see ghosts there.'
His wife said, with a quick reproach in her words: 'The ghosts of men who knew how to live and to die nobly? He would not be afraid to meet them.'
The simplicity of the words and the trustfulness of them sank into his soul. A pang of terrible consciousness went through him like poisoned steel. As his wife's eyes sought his the lights swam round with him, the music was only a confused murmur on his ear; he heard as if from afar off the voice of Olga Brancka saying: 'My dear Wanda, you are always so exalted!'