CHAPTER XVII.

It is not to be supposed that a man of Barker’s character would neglect the signal advantage he had gained in being injured, or at least badly bruised, while attempting to save Margaret from destruction.  That he had really saved her was a less point in his favour than that he had barked his shins in so doing.  The proverbial relationship between pity and love is so exceedingly well known that many professional love-makers systematically begin their campaigns by endeavouring to move the compassion of the woman they are attacking.  Occasionally they find a woman with whom pity is akin to scorn instead of to love—­and then their policy is a failure.

The dark Countess was no soft-hearted Saxon maiden, any more than she was a cold-blooded, cut-throat American girl, calculating her romance by the yard, booking her flirtations by double-entry and marrying at compound interest, with the head of a railway president and the heart of an Esquimaux.  She was rather one of those women who are ever ready to sympathise from a naturally generous and noble nature, but who rarely give their friendship and still more seldom their love.  They marry, sometimes, where there is neither.  They marry—­ye gods! why do people marry, and what reasons will they not find for marrying?  But such women, if they are wedded where their heart is not, are generally very young; far too young to know what they are doing; and though there be little inclination to the step, it always turns out that they had at least a respect for the man.  Margaret had been married to Count Alexis because it was in every way such a plausible match, and she was only eighteen then, poor thing.  But Alexis was such an uncommonly good fellow that she had honestly tried to love him, and had not altogether failed.  At least she had never had any domestic troubles, and when he was shot at Plevna, in 1876, she shed some very genuine tears and shut herself away from the world for a long time.  But though her sorrow was sincere, it was not profound, and she knew it from the first, never deceiving herself with the idea that she could not marry again.  She had sustained many a siege, however, both before her husband’s untimely death and since; and though a stranger to love, she was no novice in love-making.  Indeed few women are; certainly no beautiful women.

Margaret, then, though a pure-hearted and brave lady, was of the world, understanding the wiles thereof; and so, when Mr. Barker began to come regularly to see her, and when she noticed how very long the slight lameness he had incurred from the runaway accident seemed to last, and when she observed how cunningly he endeavoured to excite her sympathy towards him, she began to suspect that he meant something more than a mere diversion for himself.  He spoke so feelingly of his lonely position in the world; to accentuate which, he spoke of his father without any feeling