Then he left her.
She was cowed, intimidated, vanquished. When the hour was over she went through the two lines of bowing servants, and left Hohenszalras ere the noon was past.
'It is the first time in my life I ever failed,' she thought, as the pinnacles and towers of the burg were lost to her sight. 'What do these men see in that woman?'
[CHAPTER XXXVI.]
Vàsàrhely, when he left her, went straight to Sabran, who, seated on an oaken bench in the corridor of his wife's apartments, knew not how the hours passed, and seemed aged ten years in a day. Vàsàrhely motioned him to pass into one of the empty chambers. There he gave him the lines which Olga Brancka had signed.
'You are safe from her,' he said. 'She cannot tell your story to the world. She will not dare even to whisper it as a conjecture.'
Sabran did not speak. This great debt owed to his greatest foe hurt him even whilst it delivered him.
'For the first time I have concealed the truth,' pursued Vàsàrhely. 'I affected to disbelieve her story. There was no other way to save it from publicity. That alone would not have sufficed, but I had means to coerce her.'
'You have been very generous.'