would she permit it. But he has elicited no response. She has evaded
without directly avoiding him. She is no longer the impressionable shy
girl whom he knew in Russia, weighted with an unhappy fate, and rather
alarmed by the very successes of her own beauty than flattered by them.
She is a woman of the world, who knows her own value and her own power
to charm, and has acquired the talent which the world teaches, of
reading the minds of others without revealing her own. _Saule pleureur!_
the Petersburg court ladies had used to call her in those early times
when the tears had started to her eyes so quickly; but no one ever sees
tears in her eyes now.

Gervase is profoundly troubled to find how much genuine emotion the
presence of a woman whose existence he had long forgotten has power to
excite in him. He does not like emotion of any kind; and in all his
affairs of the heart he is accustomed to make others suffer, not
himself. Vanity and wounded vanity enter so largely into the influences
moulding human life, that it is very possible, if the sight of him had
had power to disturb her, the renewal of association with her would have
left him unmoved. But, as it is, he has been piqued, mortified, excited,
ad attracted; and the admiration which Brandolin and Lawrence Hamilton
and other men plainly show of her is the sharpest spur to memory and to
desire.

Whenever he has remembered Xenia Sabaroff, at such rare times as he has
heard her name mentioned in the world, he has thought of her
complacently as dwelling in the solitudes of Baltic forests, entirely
devoted to his memory. Women who are entirely devoted to their memory
men seldom trouble themselves to seek out; but to see her courted,
sought, and desired, more handsome than ever, and apparently wholly
indifferent to himself, is a shock to his self-esteem, and galvanism to
his dead wishes and slumbering recollections. He begins to perceive that
he would have done better not to forget her quite so quickly.

Meanwhile, all the guests at Surrenden, guided by a hint from Nina
Curzon, begin to see a quantity of things which do not exist, and to
exert their minds in endeavoring to remember a vast deal which they
never heard with regard to both himself and her. No one knows anything
or has a shadow of fact to go on, but this is an insignificant detail
which does not tie their tongues in the least. Nina Curzon has invention
enough to supply any _lacunae_, and in this instance he