Here among the dark trees he could think.  It was all perfectly impossible, and no happiness could possibly come to Henry either—­unless he succeeded in consoling Sabine when she should be his wife.  And this was perhaps the bitterest thought of all—­that she should ever be consoled as Henry’s wife!

Then the extreme strangeness of Henry’s still being in ignorance of his and Sabine’s relations struck him.  She had evidently not yet had the courage to tell the truth, and so the thing would come as a shock—­and what would happen then?  Who could say?  In any case, Henry could not feel he had not come up to the scratch.  Would Sabine ever tell Henry the whole story?  He felt sure she would not.  But how could things be expected to go on with the years?  It was all unthinkable now that it had come so close.

It was about five o’clock on the next afternoon that the Princess and her party arrived at Heronac.  Sabine was waiting for them in the great hall, and greeted them with feverish delight, but Henry’s worshipping eyes took in at once the fact that she was greatly changed.  She made a tremendous fuss over Girolamo, for whom a most sumptuous tea had been prepared in his own nurseries, and Henry thought how sweet she was with children and how divinely happy they would be in the future, when they had some of their own!

But what had altered his beloved?  Her face had lost its baby outline, it seemed, and her violet eyes were full of deeper shadows than even they had been in the first few days of their acquaintance at Carlsbad.  He must find all this out for himself directly they could be alone.

This chance, however, did not seem likely to be vouchsafed to him, for on the plea of having such heaps to talk over with Moravia, Sabine accompanied that lady to her room and did not appear again until they were all assembled in the big salon for dinner, where Madame Imogen, who had returned the day before, was doing her best to add to the gaiety of the party by her jolly remarks.

The lady of Heronac had hardly been able to control herself as she waited for her guests’ arrival and felt that to rush at Girolamo would be her only hope.  For that morning the post had brought the news that the divorce would be granted by the end of January, and she would be free!  She had felt very faint as she had read Mr. Parsons’ letter.  No matter how one might be expecting an axe to fall, when it does, the shock must seem immense.

Sabine lay there and moaned in her bed.  Then over her crept a fierce resentment against Henry.  Why should she be sacrificed to him?  He was forty years old, and had lived his life; and she was young, and had not yet really begun to enjoy her’s.  How would she be able to bear it; or to act even complaisance when every fiber of her being was turning in mad passion and desire to Michael, her love?