At that moment some one knocked at the door: he was glad to rise and open it to admit Count Kaulnitz and two other gentlemen.
Hardly anything else which his wife could have said would have hurt him quite so much.
As he sat there in the brilliant illumination and the hot-house warmth, with her delicate profile clear as a cameo against the light, a sensation of physical cold passed through him. He saw himself as he was, an actor, a traitor, a perjured and dishonoured man. What right had he there more than any galley-slave at the hulks?—he, Vassia Kazán?
Well tutored by the ways of the world, he laughed, and spoke, and criticised the rendering of the opera with his usual readiness of grace; but Olga Brancka had marked the fleeting expression of his face, and said to herself: 'Whatever the secret be, the key of it lies in the sands of Romaris.'
As she took his arm, when they left the box, she murmured to him: 'I shall go to Romaris, and you will take me.'
'I think not,' he said curtly, without his usual suavity. 'I am the servant of all your sex, it is true, but like all servants I am only willing to be commanded by my mistress.'
'O most faithful of lovers, I understand!' she said, with a contemptuous laugh. 'And she never commands you, she only obeys. You are very fortunate, even though you do have ghosts at your ruined tower by the sea.'
'Yes, I am fortunate, indeed,' he answered gravely, and his eyes glanced towards his wife, who was standing a stair or two below conversing with her cousin Kaulnitz.
'Even though you had to abandon Russia,' murmured Olga Brancka, dreamily. She could feel that a certain thrill passed through him. He was startled and alarmed. Was it possible that Egon Vàsàrhely had betrayed him?
'Paris is much more agreeable than St. Petersburg,' he answered carelessly. 'I am no loser. Wanda would have been unhappy, and, what would have been worse, she would never have said so.'