If you wish to _eloigner_ Brandolin,
give him some idea of the truth."

Gervase laughs a little.

"On my honor," he thinks, with some bitterness, "for sheer
uncompromising meanness there is nothing comparable to the suggestions
which a woman will make to you!"

"I couldn't do that," he says, aloud. "What would he think of me?"

"My dear Alan," replies Dorothy Usk, impatiently, getting her silks in a
tangle, "when a man has behaved to any woman as you, by your own
account, have behaved to Madame Sabaroff, I think it is a little late in
the day to pretend to much elevation of feeling."

"You do not understand----"

"I have always found," says his cousin, impatiently searching for shades
of silk which she does not see, "that whenever we presume to pronounce
an opinion on any man's conduct and think ill of it we are always told
that we don't understand anything. When we flatter the man, or
compliment him on his conduct, there is no end to the marvellous powers
of our penetration, the fineness of our instincts, the accuracy of our
intuitions."

Gervase does not hear: his thoughts are elsewhere: he is thinking of
Xenia Sabaroff as he saw her first in the Salle des Palmiers in the
Winter Palace,--a mere girl, a mere child, startled and made nervous by
the admiration she excited and the homage she received, under the
brutality of her husband, the raillery of her friends; but that time is
long ago, very long, as the life of women counts, and Xenia Sabaroff is
now perfect mistress of her own emotions, if emotions she ever feels.
Gervase cannot for one moment tell whether the past is tenderly
remembered by her, is utterly forgotten, or is only recalled to be
touched and dismissed without regret. He is a vain man, but vanity has
no power to reassure him here.

In the warm afternoon of the next day the children are in the
school-room, supposed to be preparing their lessons for the morrow; but
the German governess, who is alone as guardian of order in the temple of
intellect, has fallen asleep, with flies buzzing about her blonde hair,
and her blue spectacles pushed up on her forehead, and Dodo has taken
advantage of the fact to go and lean out of one of the windows, whilst
her sister draws a caricature of the sleeping virgin from Deutschland,
and the Babe slips away from his books to a mechanical Punch, which,
contraband in the school-room, is far dearer to him than his Gradus and
rule of three.

Dodo, with her hands thr