“There,” he said, throwing himself back in an easy-chair and looking at her with smiling lips and eyes deeply, tragically intelligent.  “That is more comfortable.  Can you tell me nothing that will amuse me?  Do you not see that my sins sit heavily on me this evening?”

“I do not know if it will amuse you,” answered Wanda, in her energetic way, as if taking him at his word and seeking to rouse him, “but Mr. Mangles and Miss Cahere are coming to tea this evening.”

Deulin made a grimace at the clock.  If he had anything to say, he seemed to be thinking, he must say it quickly.  Wanda was, perhaps, thinking the same.

“Separately they are amusing enough,” he said, slowly, “but they do not mingle.  I have an immense respect for Joseph P. Mangles.”

“So has my father,” put in Wanda, rather significantly.

“Ah! that is why you asked them.  Your father knows that in a young country events move by jerks—­that the man who is nobody to-day may be somebody to-morrow.  The mammon of unrighteousness, Wanda.”

“Yes.”

“And you are above that sort of thing.”

“I am not above anything that they deem necessary for the good of Poland,” she answered, gravely.  “They give everything.  I have not much to give, you see.”

“I suppose you have what every woman has—­to sacrifice upon some altar or another—­your happiness!”

Wanda shrugged her shoulders and said nothing.  She glanced across at him.  He knew something.  But he had learned nothing from Cartoner.  Of that, at least, she was sure.

“Happiness, or a hope of happiness,” he went on, reflectively.  “Perhaps one is as valuable as the other.  Perhaps they are the same thing.  If you gain a happiness you lose a hope, remember that.  It is not always remembered by women, and very seldom by men.”

“Is it so precious?  It is common enough, at all events.”

“What is common enough?” he asked, absent-mindedly.

“Hope.”

“Hope! connais pas!” he exclaimed, with a sudden laugh.  “You must ask some one who knows more about it.  I am a man of sorrow, Wanda; that is why I am so gay.”

And his laugh was indeed light-hearted enough.

“The rain makes one feel lonely, that is all,” he went on, as if seeking to explain his own humor.  “Rain and cold and half a dozen drawbacks to existence lose their terrors if one has an in-door life to turn to and a fire to sit by.  That is why I am here.”

And he drew his chair nearer to the burning logs.  Wanda now knew that he had something to tell her—­that he had come for no other purpose.  And, that he should be delicate and careful in his approach, told her that it was of Cartoner he had come to speak.  While the delicacy and care showed her that he had guessed something, it also opened up a new side to his character.  For the susceptibilities of men and women who have passed middle age are usually dull, and often quite dead, to the sensitiveness of younger hearts.  It almost seemed that he divined that Wanda’s heart was sensitive and sore, like an exposed nerve, though she showed the world a quiet face, such as the Bukatys had always shown through as long and grim a family history as the world has known.