She cut her mare across the ears with a fierce gesture and galloped away from him. Sabran as he galloped after her thought with a vague apprehension, 'Why does she dwell on Romaris? Does she suspect that I abhor the place? Can she have seen anything in my looks or in my words that has raised any doubts in her?' But he told himself that this was impossible. As she rode her heart swelled with rage and mortification. There were many men in the world who would have been happy to go at her call to Breton wilds, or any other solitude; and he refused her, bluntly, coldly, because away there in the heart of Austria a woman, who was the mother of his children, span, and read, and said her prayers, and led her stupid, blameless, stately life! He escaped her just because that woman lived! All that hot, cruel caprice which she called love fastened upon him, and swore that it would not be denied. She had a sense of a grand white figure which stood for ever betwixt him and her. She brought herself almost to believe that it was Wanda von Szalras who wronged her.
Two nights later she was present at the last night of a gay comic opera which had made all Paris laugh ever since the first fogs of winter; a dazzling little opera, with a stage crowded by Louis Treize costumes, and music that went as trippingly as a shepherdess's feet in a pastoral. Sabran went to her box after a dinner-party which he had given to a score of men. She looked well, in a gown of many shades of yellow, which few women could have braved, but which suited her night-like eyes and her pearly skin; she had deep yellow roses, natural ones, in her bosom and hair.
'I am flattered that you wear my yellow roses,' he murmured.
'If you had sent me white ones you would have outraged the spirit of Wanda.'
He made an impatient movement.
'When are you going home?' she said, suddenly.
'Soon!' he answered, with the same impatience.
'Soon means anything, from an hour to a year. Besides, you have said it for the last six weeks.'
'Do you go to Noisettiers?'
'Of course I go to Noisettiers; you can come there if you please. I am more hospitable than you.'