of it was that the English people in the Kurhaus were regarded by their compatriots in the English quarter as sheep of the blackest dye!  This was all the more ridiculous because with two exceptions—­firstly of Mrs. Reffold, who took nearly all her pleasures with the American colony in the Grand Hotel; and secondly, of a Scotch widow who had returned to Petershof to weep over her husband’s grave, but put away her grief together with her widow’s weeds, and consoled herself with a Spanish gentleman—­with these two exceptions, the little English community in the Kurhaus was most humdrum and harmless, being occupied, as in the case of the Disagreeable Man, with cameras and cheese-mites, or in other cases with the still more engrossing pastime of taking care of one’s ill-health, whether real or fancied:  but yet, an innocent hobby in itself and giving one absolutely no leisure to do anything worse:  a great recommendation for any pastime.

This was not Bernardine’s occupation:  it was difficult to say what she did with herself, for she had not yet followed Robert Allitsen’s advice and taken up some definite work:  and the very fact that she had no such wish, pointed probably to a state of health which forbade it.  She, naturally so keen and hard-working, was content to take what the hour brought, and the hour brought various things:  chess with the Swedish professor, or Russian dominoes with the shrivelled-up little Polish governess who always tried to cheat, and who clutched her tiny winnings with precisely the same greediness shown by the Monte Carlo female gamblers.  Or the hour brought a stroll with the French danseuse and her poodle, and a conversation about the mere trivialities of life, which a year or two, or even a few months ago, Bernardine would have condemned as beneath contempt, but, which were now taking their rightful place in her new standard of importances.  For some natures learn with greater difficulty and after greater delay than others, that the real importances of our existence are the nothingnesses of every-day life, the nothingnesses which the philosopher in his study, reasoning about and analysing human character, is apt to overlook; but which, nevertheless, make him and every one else more of a human reality and less of an abstraction.  And Bernardine, hitherto occupied with so-called intellectual pursuits, with problems of the study, of no value to the great world outside the study, or with social problems of the great world, great movements, and great questions, was now just beginning to appreciate the value of the little incidents of that same great world.  Or the hour brought its own thoughts, and Bernardine found herself constantly thinking of the Disagreeable Man:  always in sorrow and always with sympathy, and sometimes with tenderness.

When he told her about the one sacrifice, she could have wished to wrap him round with love and tenderness.  If he could only have known it, he had never been so near love as then.  She had suffered so much herself, and, with increasing weaknesses, had so wished to put off the burden of the flesh, that her whole heart went out to him.