ation is ended.

Mr. Wootton has never been so treated in his life.

CHAPTER XI.

Brandolin walks down the opening between the glass doors into the
garden. He paces impatiently the green shady walks where he has seen her
on other mornings than this. It is lovely weather, and the innumerable
roses fill the warm moist air with fragrance. There is a sea-breeze
blowing from the sea-coast some thirty miles away; his schooner is in
harbor there; he thinks that it would be wisest to go to it and sail
away again for as many thousand miles as he has just left behind him.
Xenia Sabaroff has a great and growing influence over him, and he does
not wish her to exercise it and increase it if this thing be true:
perhaps, after all, she may be that kind of sorceress of which Mary
Stuart is the eternal type,--cold only that others may burn, _reculant
pour mieux sauter_, exquisitely feminine only to be more dangerously
powerful. He does not wish to play the _role_ of Chastelard, or of
Douglas, or of Henry Darnley. He is stung to the quick by what he has
heard said.

It is not new: since the arrival of Gervase the same thing has been
hinted more or less clearly, more or less obscurely, within his hearing
more than once; but the matter-of-fact words of Litroff have given the
tale a kind of circumstantiality and substance which the vague uncertain
suggestions of others did not do. Litroff has, obviously, no feeling
against her; he even speaks of her with reluctance and admiration:
therefore his testimony has a truthfulness about it which would be
lacking in any mere malicious scandal.

It is intensely painful to him to believe, or even to admit to himself
as possible, that it may be thus true. She seems to him a very queen
among women: all the romance of his temperament clothes her with ideal
qualities. He walks on unconsciously till he has left the west garden
and entered the wood which joins it, and the grassy seats made
underneath the boughs. As he goes, his heart thrills, his pulse
quickens: he sees Madame Sabaroff. She is seated on one of the turf
banks, reading, the dog of the house at her feet. He has almost walked
on to her before he has perceived her.

"I beg your pardon," he murmurs, and pauses, undecided whether to go or
stay.

She looks at him a little surprised at the ceremony of his manner.

"For what do you beg my pardon? You are as free of the wood as I," she
replies, with a smile. "I promised the children