“My mother’s ideas are old-fashioned; and I don’t know that it’s anybody’s business but yours and mine.”

“Yes, but—­”

“Here we are.”  The brougham was turning under the archway of the hotel, and the light of Hubert’s tall windows fell across the dusky court.  Raymond helped her out, and they mounted to their door by the stairs which Hubert had recarpeted in velvet, with a marble nymph lurking in the azaleas on the landing.

In the antechamber Raymond paused to take her cloak from her shoulders, and his eyes rested on her with a faint smile of approval.

“You never looked better; your dress is extremely becoming.  Good-night, my dear,” he said, kissing her hand as he turned away.

Undine kept this incident to herself:  her wounded pride made her shrink from confessing it even to Madame de Trezac.  She was sure Raymond would “come back”; Ralph always had, to the last.  During their remaining weeks in Paris she reassured herself with the thought that once they were back at Saint Desert she would easily regain her lost hold; and when Raymond suggested their leaving Paris she acquiesced without a protest.  But at Saint Desert she seemed no nearer to him than in Paris.  He continued to treat her with unvarying amiability, but he seemed wholly absorbed in the management of the estate, in his books, his sketching and his music.  He had begun to interest himself in politics and had been urged to stand for his department.  This necessitated frequent displacements:  trips to Beaune or Dijon and occasional absences in Paris.  Undine, when he was away, was not left alone, for the dowager Marquise had established herself at Saint Desert for the summer, and relays of brothers and sisters-in-law, aunts, cousins and ecclesiastical friends and connections succeeded each other under its capacious roof.  Only Hubert and his wife were absent.  They had taken a villa at Deauville, and in the morning papers Undine followed the chronicle of Hubert’s polo scores and of the Countess Hubert’s racing toilets.

The days crawled on with a benumbing sameness.  The old Marquise and the other ladies of the party sat on the terrace with their needle-work, the cure or one of the visiting uncles read aloud the Journal des Debats and prognosticated dark things of the Republic, Paul scoured the park and despoiled the kitchen-garden with the other children of the family, the inhabitants of the adjacent chateaux drove over to call, and occasionally the ponderous pair were harnessed to a landau as lumbering as the brougham, and the ladies of Saint Desert measured the dusty kilometres between themselves and their neighbours.