When he had gone, she bathed quickly, partially dressed herself, and called her maid to do her hair.  Sitting before the improvised dressing-table, she glanced in the mirror, and her reflection caught and held her attention a long moment.  A curious, half-wistful, half-pathetic expression crept into her eyes as the realization came to her sharply that she was fading.  There were lines and shadows and pallor that ought not to be in the face of a woman of thirty-five.  She smoothed the vertical lines in her forehead, and then let her hands remain over her face, while behind their cool smoothness her mind resumed its troublesome thoughts.

It was not like meeting some new difficulty for which the strength is fresh; it was struggling again with emotions that have repeatedly exhausted one’s endurance.  Just as she had every hope that her husband was cured of the gambler’s fever, here he was down again with an even more dangerous form of it.  The man who knowingly risks is bad enough; but the man who cannot see that he risks, and cannot understand how he has lost is the hardest victim to cure.  All of her capital was gone except a small property which her brother-in-law, J. B. Randolph, held for her in trust and on the income of which they now lived.  Ten years before she had had considerable money, enough for them to live not only in comfort but in luxury.  A large amount had been sunk in a Sicilian sulphur mine, and to this investment she had given her consent, not yet realizing her husband’s lack of judgment.  But aside from this, cards and horse races and trips to Monaco had limited their living in luxury to a periodic pleasure of three or four months.  Now in order to open the palace in Rome, they had to practise the most rigid economics the other eight or nine months in their villa in the country.

Yet in spite of all, her compassion went out to Sandro.  He was so gay, so boy-like, that he acquired ascendancy over her sympathies in spite of her judgment.  And by the time her maid had coiled her great golden waves of hair and helped her into a short, heavy skirt, a pair of stout boots, a plain shirt-waist, and a rough, short coat and cap, her feeling of resentment against him had passed.  She drew on a pair of dogskin gloves, and went out.

In the stables she found the prince helping to harness a pony.

“Are you going to drive to the village?” she asked as cheerfully as though there had been no topic of distress.

“Yes; will you come with me?” he returned eagerly.  She nodded her assent and as they started down the road they talked easily of various things.  It was the prince who finally came back to the topic that was uppermost in their minds.  He looked at her tenderly as he said: 

“You do believe, my darling, don’t you, that to have brought this additional trouble to you breaks my heart?  I have taken everything from you—­given you nothing in return.  Yet—­I do love you.”