erself.

"He adores Sabine--who will trample on him--she always rules
everything--and I would have been his sympathetic companion, and would
have let him rule me--!" Then something she could not reconcile in her
mind struck her.

If Sabine had never seen her husband since the day after she was
married--what had caused her to be so pale and sad and utterly changed
when she came to her, Moravia, in Rome--a year or more afterwards, and
to have made her break entirely with her uncle and aunt? The secret of
her friend's life lay in that year--that year after she herself married
and went off with her husband Girolamo to Italy--the year which Sabine
had spent in America--alone. But she knew very well that, fond as they
were of one another, Sabine would probably never tell her about it. So
presently she got into bed and, sighing at the incongruity and
inconsiderateness of circumstance, she turned out the light.

Sabine that same night read of further entertainments at Ostende in the
_New York Herald_--and shut her full, firm lips with an ominous force.
And so she and Henry had parted at the Carlsbad station next day with
the understanding between them that, when Sabine could tell him that she
was free, he would be at liberty to press his suit and she would give a
favorable answer.

She thought of these past things now for a moment while she re-read Lord
Fordyce's letter. It told her, there in her Heronac garden, in a hurried
P.S. that a friend had joined him that moment at Havre, and clamored to
be taken on the trip, too, claiming an old promise. He was quite a nice
young man--but if she did not want any extra person, she was to wire to
----, where they would arrive about eleven o'clock, and there this
interloper should be ruthlessly marooned! The post had evidently been
going, and the P.S. must have been written in frightful haste after the
advent of the friend--for his name was not even given.

Sabine had not wired. She felt a certain sense of relief. It would make
someone to talk to Madame Imogen and the Cure--and cause there to be no
_gene_.

Then her thoughts turned to Henry himself with tender friendship. So
dear a companion, and how glad she would be to see him again. The ten
days since they had parted at Carlsbad seemed actually long! Surely it
was a wise thing to do to start her real life with one whom she could so
truly respect; there could be no pitfalls and disappointments! And his
great position in England w