ught in which she had no part. She
felt herself ignored, abandoned; and all her passions rushed to the
defence of her wounded vanity.

"Oh, believe me," she cried, "I speak as your Duchess, not as your wife.
That is a name in which I should never dream of appealing to you. I have
ever stood apart from your private pleasures, as became a woman of my
house." She faced him with a flash of the Austrian insolence. "But when
I see the state drifting to ruin as the result of your caprice, when I
see your own life endangered, your people turned against you, religion
openly insulted, law and authority made the plaything of
this--this--false atheistical creature, that has robbed me--robbed me of
all--" She broke off helplessly and hid her face with a sob.

Odo stood speechless, spell-bound. He could not mistake what had
happened. The woman had surged to the surface at last--the real woman,
passionate, self-centred, undisciplined, but so piteous, after all, in
this sudden subjection to the one tenderness that survived in her. She
loved him and was jealous of her rival. That was the instinct which had
swept all others aside. At that moment she cared nothing for her safety
or his. The state might perish if they but fell together. It was the
distance between them that maddened her.

The tragic simplicity of the revelation left Odo silent. For a fantastic
moment he yielded to the vision of what that waste power might have
accomplished. Life seemed to him a confusion of roving force that met
only to crash in ruins.

His silence drew her to her feet. She repossessed herself, throbbing but
valiant.

"My fears for your Highness's safety have led my speech astray. I have
given your Highness the warning it was my duty to give. Beyond that I
had no thought of trespassing."

And still Odo was silent. A dozen answers struggled to his lips; but
they were checked by the stealing sense of duality that so often
paralysed his action. He had recovered his lucidity of vision, and his
impulses faded before it like mist. He saw life again as it was, an
incomplete and shabby business, a patchwork of torn and ravelled effort.
Everywhere the shears of Atropos were busy, and never could the cut
threads be joined again.

He took his wife's hand and bent over it ceremoniously. It lay in his
like a stone.

4.8.

The jubilee of the Mountain Madonna fell on the feast of the
Purification. It was mid-November, but with a sky of June. The autumn
rai