ral condition, she had peevishly brushed all thought of
her cousin aside, accounting his unhappiness as small beside her own.

Many years later, when the long period of her bitter schooling had
moulded her into something far finer than her youth had promised; when,
also, she had brought the art of concealment to its height of
perfection; the memory of her lost cousin's gallant and loyal devotion
recurred to her, together with the surmise that she had been the cause
of his dismissal from the army, and the still more amazing fact that he
was now beginning to be recognized as an incalculable power in the world
of music. An interview with Vladimir de Windt confirmed her first
belief; a symphony concert at the Conservatoire hall, fixed the second.
And then, suddenly, she discovered that the man who had sought ruin
because of her loss, and who had risen, pedestalled, from that ruin to
another and a greater personality, had won a place in her heart from
which he was not to be driven.

For many years, now, his spoken name had never failed to stir her
secretly. Though, in the ordinary sense of the word, she was hardly
musical, her emotional nature had been too fully developed for her not
to recognize the power that breathed through Ivan's tempestuous or
fairy-like compositions. She began to make his work her peculiar study;
and never a phrase of it but touched her deeply, strangely; in spite of
which, _mondaine_ that she must always be, it was not till she heard
that he had inherited the title and wealth of his father, that she began
sentimentally to exalt her undefined feeling for him.

Certainly, had it not been for his present social status, Nathalie
Feodoreff, even in the desolation that had followed the tragic climax of
her years of married martyrdom, would never have sought that first
meeting with her cousin. Yet she was not to be judged upon that fact
alone. She was a devoted mother. She had been a faithful wife to a man
who had lowered his manhood to a level beneath that of the very beasts.
She had borne with him through degradation, insult, once or twice
physical violence; and this not only because Russian orthodoxy gives no
quarter to a rebellious wife, whatever the provocation. But when that
time arrived when her duty to her children and her duty to her wretched
husband could no longer be compatible; when the two little girls
remaining to her out of five children, began to question the
relationship between their gov