It amounted to scarcely more than a single meagre fact.  A few months after the divorce, she had returned to Granjolaye, and she had never once been known to set her foot beyond the limits of her garden from that day to this.  She had arrived at night, attended by her two German ladies-in-waiting.  A carriage had met her at the railway station in Bayonne, and set her down at the doors of her Chateau, where her aunt, old Mademoiselle Henriette, awaited her.  What manner of life she led there, nobody had the poorest means of discovering.  Her own servants (tongue-tied by fear or love) could not be got to speak; and from the eyes of all outsiders she was sedulously screened.  Paul could imagine her, in her great humiliation, solitary among the ruins of her high destiny, hiding her wounds; too sensitive to face the curiosity, too proud to brook the pity, of the world.  She seemed to him a very grandiose and tragic figure, and he lost himself musing of her—­her with whom he had played at being married, when they were children here, so long, so long ago.  She was the daughter, the only child and heiress, of the last Duc de la Granjolaye de Ravanches,—­the same nobleman of whom it was told that when Louis Napoleon, meaning to be gracious, said to him, ‘You bear a great name, Monsieur,’ he had answered sweetly, ‘The greatest of all, I think.’  It is certain he was the head of one of the most illustrious houses in the noblesse of Europe, descended directly and legitimately, through the Bourbons, from Saint Louis of France; and, to boot, he was immensely rich, owning (it was said) half the iron mines in the north of Spain, as well as a great part of the city of Bayonne.  Paul’s grandmother, the Comtesse de Louvance, was his next neighbour.  Paul remembered him vaguely as a tall, drab, mild-mannered man, with a receding chin, and a soft, rather piping voice, who used to tip him, and have him over a good deal to stay at Granjolaye.

On the death of Madame de Louvance, the property of Saint-Graal had passed to her son, Edmond,—­Andre’s feu Monsieur le Comte.  Edmond rarely lived there, and never asked his sister or her boy there; whence, twenty years ago, at the respective ages of thirteen and eleven, Paul and Helene had vanished from each other’s ken.  But Edmond never married, either; and when, last winter, he died, he left a will making Paul his heir.  Of Helene’s later history Paul knew as much as all the world knows, and no more—­so much, that is, as one could gather from newspapers and public rumour.  He knew of her father’s death, whereby she had become absolute mistress of his enormous fortune.  He knew of her princely marriage, and of her elevation by the old king to her husband’s rank of Royal Highness.  He knew of that swift series of improbable deaths which had culminated in her husband’s accession to the throne, and how she had been crowned Queen-Consort.  And then he knew that three or four years afterwards she had sued for and obtained