mpromising messages which would have got
you into trouble in Downing Street. The thing died a natural death; you
did not care to keep it alive: why are you now all lamentations over its
grave? I really do not follow the course of your emotions,--if you feel
any emotion: I thought you never did. Madame Sabaroff has never been a
person difficult to follow or to find; the fashionable intelligence of
the newspapers would at any time have enabled you to know where she was;
you never had inclination or remembrance enough to make you curious to
see her again, and then when you come across her in a country house you
think yourself very ill used because she does not all at once fall into
your arms. You couldn't possibly care about her, since you never tried
to see her all those years!"

Dorothy Usk is really annoyed.

She is not a person who has a high standard of humanity at any time, and
she knows men thoroughly, and they have no chance of being heroes in her
sight. But she likes a man to be a man, and to be an ardent lover if he
be a lover at all, and her favorite cousin seems to her to wear a poor
aspect in this page of his autobiography.

"Pray, did you know that she is as rich as she is?" she asks, with some
sharpness in her tone.

Gervase colors a little, being conscious that his response cannot
increase his cousin's sympathies with him.

"No. Is she rich? Paul Sabaroff was poor. He had gambled away nearly
everything. Your children have a great deal of _blague_ about her
riches; but I suppose it is all nonsense."

"Not nonsense at all. Two years ago some silver was discovered on a bit
of rough land which belonged to her, somewhere beyond the Urals, I
think, and she is enormously rich,--will be richer every year, they
say."

"Indeed!"

He tries to look indifferent, but his cousin's penetrating eyes seem to
him to be reading his very soul.

"How dreadfully sorry he must be that he didn't leave Madrid!" she
thinks, and aloud says, irritably, "Why on earth didn't you try to renew
things with her all these three years?"

"I imagined that I had forgotten her."

"Well, so you had,--completely forgotten her, till you saw her here."

"On my honor, she is the only woman I have ever really loved."

"Oh, men always say that of somebody or another, generally of the most
impossible people. George always declares that the only woman he ever
really loved was a pastry-cook when he was at Christ-church."

"Dear Dorothy, d