Within half an hour he had given a few orders to his major-domo, and had taken a special train to overtake the express, already for on its way that night towards Strasburg. No steam could fly as fast as his own wishes flew. Never had he felt happier than as the train rushed across the windy level country of the north-east, bearing him back to the peace and tenderness and honour which waited for him at Hohenszalrasburg. He was content with himself, and the future smiled on him. He slept soundly all that night, undisturbed by the panting and oscillating of the carriage, and visited by tranquil dreams. He did not break the journey till he reached S. Johann. The weather in the German lands was wild and rough. The sound of the winds and rushing rains brought the remembrance of that year of the floods which had been the sweetest of his life. Amidst the Austrian Alps the cold was still keen, and the brisk buoyant air and the strength, that seems always to come on winds that blow over glaciers and snow-fields were welcome to him, like a familiar and trusty friend. The servants who met him in answer to his message, the horses who knew him and whinnied with pleasure, the summits of the Glöckner, on which a noon-day sun was shining, all were delightful to him: he thought of the Catullian 'laugh in the dimples of home.'
Their ways of life renewed themselves as if they had never been broken. She divined what had passed, but she never spoke of it. She was happy in his return, and never disturbed its happiness by inquiry or allusion. He entered with eagerness into plans and projects which had of recent years ceased to interest him, and he resumed his old occupations and pursuits with almost boyish ardour. His restlessness was appeased, and if a dull apprehension beat at his heart with warning now and then, it was scarcely heeded in his deep sense of the intense and forbearing love his wife bore to him. She never asked him how he had escaped from Olga Brancka. She was satisfied that if he had been faithless to herself, he would not have returned with such single-hearted contentment and such lover-like fervour.
'You are the only woman in the world who can forbear from putting questions,' said Madame Ottilie to her.
She answered smiling:
'I remember Psyche's lamp.'
'That is very pretty,' said the Princess, 'and I do believe you would never have cared for the lamp. But, all the same, if the god had been as honest as he ought to have been, would he have minded the light?'
'I do not think that enters into the story,' said Wanda. 'He did not resent the light either; he resented the inquisitiveness.'
'You are the only woman who has none,' said the Princess, taking up her netting, and at times she called her niece Pschye, little imagining the terrible suitability of the name, and the secret that was hidden in darkness from that noble confidence of the last of the Szalras.
The remembrance of that night of base temptation left a sense of uneasiness and of insecurity upon Sabran, but the influence his temptress had possessed with him was of that kind which fades instantly in absence. He honestly abhorred the memory of her, and never spoke her name.
His wife, to whom the utter degradation of her cousin's wife would never have seemed possible in a woman nobly born and nurtured, never imagined the truth or anything similar to it.