The old lines of Marlowe came to his mind and his lips:
'O! thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.'
'I am not young enough to merit that quotation,' she said, with a smile; 'ten years ago perhaps——'
Her heart contracted as she spoke; she was conscious that she had wished to look well in his eyes that night. The sense that she was stooping to measure weapons with such an opponent as Olga Brancka smote her with a sense of humiliation, which did not leave her throughout the after hours in which she carried her jewels through the gorgeous crowd of the ball at the Austrian Embassy.
'If I lower myself to such a contest as that,' she thought, 'I shall lose all self-respect and all his reverence. I shall seem scarcely to him higher than an importunate mistress.'
Now and again there came to her a passionate anger against himself, a hardening of her heart to him, since he could thus be guilty of this inexcusable and insensate folly. But she would not harbour these; she would not judge him; she would not blame him. Her marriage vows were not mere dead letters to her. She conceived that obedience and silence were her clearest duties. Only one thing was outside her duty and beyond her force—she could not stoop to rivalry with Olga Brancka.
All at once she took a resolution of which few women would have been capable. She resolved to leave them.
Three days after the ball she said very quietly to him:
'If you do not object, I will go home and take the children. It is time they were at Hohenszalras. Bela, above all, is not improved by what he sees and hears here; his studies are broken and his fancy is excited. In a very little while he would learn quite to despise his country pleasures, and forget all his own people. I will take them home.'
He looked at her quickly in surprise.