strange
face, half-dreamy, half-sensual, filled with great mystery and great
charm. The photographs show him in the elaborate uniform of an officer
of the throne-guards, in fancy-dress as a medieval knight, in flannels
and in ordinary mufti. The duchess' eyes pass slowly from one to the
other; she compares the likenesses, a sad smile about her mouth and
melancholy in her eyes. Then she unties the ribbons of the letters,
takes them out of the carefully preserved envelopes, unfolds them and
reads here and there and reads again and refolds them....

She knows by heart the phrases that still tell her of a strange passion,
the most fervent, the truest, the simplest and perhaps for that reason
the strangest that she has ever felt, that has surrounded her with fairy
meshes of fire. Though her eyes look out again at the deer--the sunshine
streams like fluid gold over the park--between her and the peaceful
landscape there rise up, transparent, in tenderly gleaming
phantasmagorias, remembrances of the past, the pictures of that love,
and it seems to her as though sparks are dancing before her eyes, as
though brilliant curves and scintillations of light are swarming on
every hand. She lives through past events in a few moments; then she
closes her eyes, draws her hand over her forehead and thinks how sad it
is that the past is nothing more than a little memory, which flies like
dust and ashes through our souls which we sometimes endeavour, in vain,
to collect in a costly urn. How sad it is that one cannot go on
mourning, though one wish to, because life does not permit it! Nothing
but that dust and ashes in her soul ... and those letters, those
photographs....

She locks them away again and now gazes at the jewels. And she looks
well into her own heart, sees herself exactly as she is, for she knows
that she has been loyal, always, loyal to him and to herself: loyal when
their love broke like a glittering rainbow of sparkling colours on a
wide firmament and she became unwilling to see or to exist and withdrew
from the court into this castle and let it be rumoured that a lingering
illness was causing her to pine away. And she mourned and mourned, first
sobbing and wringing her hands, then calmer in despair, then ... The
deer had gone on grazing there, as though they always remained
unchanged. But she....

* * * * *

She had been loyal, always: in her despair and also in what followed, in
the abate