the second winter season he had a
violent fit of jealousy, and sent her to his estate on the White
Sea----"

"Jealousy of you?"

Gervase bowed.

"Where she was kept in a state of surveillance scarcely better than
absolute imprisonment. I did all manner of crazy and romantic things to
endeavor to see her; and once or twice I succeeded; but he had
discovered letters of mine, and made her captivity more rigorous than
ever. I myself was ordered on the special mission to Spain,--you
remember,--and I left Russia with a broken heart. From that time to this
I have never seen her."

"But your broken heart has continued to do its daily work?"

"It is a figure of speech. I adored her, and the husband was a brute.
When Lustoff shot him he only rid the world of a brute. You have seen
that broad bracelet she wears above the right elbow? People always talk
so about it. She wears it to hide where Sabaroff broke her arm one night
in his violence: the marks of it are there forever."

Lady Usk is silent: she is divided between her natural compassion and
sympathy, which are very easily roused, and her irritation at
discovering that her new favorite is what Usk would call "just like all
the rest of them."

"You perceive," he added, "that, as the princess chooses wholly to
ignore the past, it is not for me to recall it. I am obliged to accept
her decision, however much I must suffer from it."

"Suffer!" echoes his cousin. "After her husband's death you never took
the trouble to cross Europe to see her."

"She had never answered my letters," says Gervase, but he feels that the
excuse is a frail one. And how, he thinks, angrily, should a good woman
like his cousin, who has never flirted in her life and never done
anything which might not have been printed in the daily papers,
understand a man's inevitable inconstancy?

"I assure you that I have never loved any woman as I loved her," he
continues.

"Then you are another proof, if one were wanted, that men have died and
worms have eaten them, but not for----"

"I did not die, certainly," Gervase says, much irritated; "but I
suffered greatly, whether you choose to believe it or not."

"I am not inclined to believe it," replies his hostess. "It is not your
style."

"I wrote to her a great many times."

He pauses.

Lady Usk fills up the pause. "And she answered you?" she inquires.

"N-no," replies Gervase, unwilling to confess such an affront to him.
"She did not write. Pru