r imagination is
stimulated by a double jealousy: she is jealous of Lawrence Hamilton,
whom she is inclined to dismiss, and she is jealous of Brandolin, whom
she is inclined to appropriate.

Twenty-four hours have not elapsed since the arrival of Gervase, before
she has given a dozen people the intimate conviction that she knows all
about him and the Princess Sabaroff, and that there is something very
dreadful in it,--much worse than in the usual history of such relations.
Everything is possible in Russia, she says, and has a way of saying this
which suggests unfathomable abysses of license and crime.

No one has the slightest idea what she means, but no one will be behind
any other in conjecturing; and there rises about the unconscious figure
of Xenia Sabaroff a haze of vague suggested indistinct suspicion, like
the smoke of the blue fires which hide the form of the Evil One on the
stage in operas. Brandolin perceives it, and is deeply irritated.

"What is it to me?" he says to himself, but says so in vain.

Fragments of these ingenious conjectures and imaginary recollections
come to his ear and annoy him intensely,--annoy him the more because his
swift intuitions and unerring perceptions have told him from his own
observation that Xenia Sabaroff does not see in Gervase altogether a
stranger, though she has greeted him as such. Certain things are said
which he would like to resent, but he is powerless to do so.

His days have been delightful to him before the arrival of this other
man at Surrenden; now they are troubled and embittered. Yet he is not
inclined to break off his visit abruptly and go to Scotland, Germany, or
Norway, as might be wisest. He is in love with Xenia Sabaroff in a
manner which surprises himself. He thought he had outlived that sort of
boyish and imaginative passion. But she has a great power over his fancy
and his senses, and she is more like his earliest ideal of a woman than
any one he has ever met.

"Absurd that I should have an ideal at all at my age!" he thinks to
himself; but, as there are some who are never accompanied by that
ethereal attendant even in youth, so there are some whom it never leaves
till they reach their graves.

Therefore when he hears these vague, floating, disagreeable jests, he
suffers acutely, and finds himself in the position which is perhaps most
painful of all to any man who is a gentleman, that of being compelled to
sit silent and hear a woman he longs to pr