of the Babe.

"Give me time to think," she says, in a low tone to Brandolin; and then,
with her hand still on the little boy's shoulder, she turns away from
him and walks slowly towards the house.

The child walks silently and shyly beside her, his happy vanity troubled
for once by the sense that he has made some mistake, and that there are
some few things still in the universe which he does not quite entirely
understand.

"You are not angry?" he asks her, at last, with a vague terror in his
gay and impudent little soul.

"Angry with you?" says Xenia Sabaroff. "My dear child, no. I am perhaps
angry with myself,--myself of many years ago."

The Babe is silent: he does not venture to ask any more, and he has a
humiliating feeling that he is not first in the thoughts of Madame
Sabaroff,--nay, that, though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon
his shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten him.

Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her great charm for him
consists in the power she possesses of compelling him to control his
impulses. He walks away by himself through the green shadows of the
boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. He is fully aware that
he has done a rash, perhaps an utterly unwise, thing in putting his
future into the hands of a woman of whom he knows so little, and has,
perhaps, the right to suspect so much. Yet he does not repent.

He does not see her again before dinner. She does not come into the
library at the tea-hour; there is a large dinner that night; county
people are there, as well as the house-party. He has to take in a stupid
woman, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, who thinks him the most
absent-minded and unpleasant person she has ever known, and wonders how
he has got his reputation as a wit. He is so seated that he cannot even
see Xenia Sabaroff, and he chafes and frets throughout the dinner, from
the bisque soup to the caviare biscuit, and thinks what an idiotic thing
the habits of society have made of human life.

When he is fairly at rare intervals goaded into speech, he utters
paradoxes, and suggests views so startling that the wife of the
Lord-Lieutenant is scandalized, and thinks the lunacy laws are defective
if they cannot include and incarcerate him. She feels sure that the
rumor about the Hindoo women at St. Hubert's Lea is entirely true.

After dinner he is free to approach the lady of his thoughts, but he
endeavors in vain to tell from her face