ispered with a little gasp in her breath, "I would take
all pain away from you, dear, if I could, but I can't do anything, only
just pet and love you into feeling better. After all, everything passes
in time. I thought I should never get over the death of my husband,
Girolamo, and now I don't care a bit--in fact, I only care about you and
want to make you less unhappy."

The Princess thoroughly believed in La Rochefoucauld's maxim with the
advice that people were more likely to take to a new passion when still
agitated by the rests of the old one than if they were completely cured.
She intended, now that she was released from all honor to her friend, to
do her very uttermost to draw Henry to herself, and thought it much
wiser to begin to strike when the iron was hot.

Henry did not answer her; he merely pressed her hand, while he thought
how un-English, her action was, and how very kind. She was certainly the
dearest woman he had ever met--beyond Sabine.

Moravia was not at all discouraged, but continued to rub his hands,
first one and then the other, while he remained passive under her touch.

"Sabine is perfectly crushed with all this," she went on. "I have just
left her. She does not know what you mean to do, but I am sure I can
guess. You mean to give her back to Mr. Arranstoun--and it will be much
better. She has always been in love with him, I believe, and would never
have agreed to try to arrange for a divorce if she had not been awfully
jealous about Daisy Van der Horn. I remember now telling her quite
innocently of the reports about them in Paris before we went to England,
and now that I come to think of it, I noticed she was rather spiteful
over it at the time."

Henry did not answer, so she continued, in a frank, matter-of-fact way:

"You can imagine what a strange character Sabine has when I tell you, in
all these years of our intimate friendship she never has told me a word
of her story until just now. She was keeping it all in to herself--I
can't think why."

Henry did speak at last, but his words came slowly. "She wanted to
forget, poor little girl, and that was the best way to bury it all out
of sight."

"There you are quite wrong," returned Moravia, now seated upon her
footstool again, very close, with her elbows propped on Henry's knees,
while she still held his hands and intermittently caressed them with her
cheek. "That is the way to keep hurts burning and paining forever,
fostering them all