The Marquise de Henares did not come.  She wrote that she was out of health, and was beside detained in Madrid by a thousand social duties; but in the spring or summer she would be very pleased to come and spend a few weeks with her only child and her grandchildren.

Wilhelm maintained an outward show of calm.  He did not renew his attempt at revolt, made no resistance against the fact that Pilar took entire possession of his existence, and clung to him like his shadow; he only grew paler, and quieter, and more despondent than before.  But he pondered day and night upon some way of unraveling the knot, and was in despair at finding none.  Should he cut it?  He could not.  He lived over again the scene in the dining room; he pictured to himself how Pilar would sob, and fling herself on the floor, and clasp his knees, and tear her hair, and saw himself, after a useless repetition of his torture, disarmed anew.  For one moment he thought of giving a cry for help, of calling Schrotter to his aid, but he was ashamed of his want of manliness, and put the idea from him.  There was nothing for it but to resign himself.  He did so with a gloomy, desperate relinquishment of all his principles, his sense of morality, his ideals of life.  He was the victim of a malign fate, and there was no use fighting against it.  He must accept it as he would sickness or death.  He was untrue to himself, was a dissembler before himself and others:  it lay in the inexorable logic of things that he must suffer for it.  But what a shipwreck!  After a pure and dignified life, wholly filled up by duty and a striving after knowledge, entirely devoted to warring against the animal element in man, and to educating himself up to an ideal standard of freedom from ignoble instincts, thus shamefully to choke and drown in the muddy lees of a love-potion!

Pilar, who fancied him reconciled to the situation, grew easier in her mind, and by degrees lost much of her distrust.  About a month later, toward the middle of March, she had so far regained her equanimity as to allow herself, after a steady resistance, to be persuaded by a friend to attend her house-warming ball—­“pendre la cremaillere,” as they call it in Paris.  The friend was quite as superstitious as Pilar herself, and had vowed a hundred times over that she would have no luck in her new house if Pilar were absent from the opening ball.

It was not till ten o’clock in the evening that she finally made up her mind.  She waited till Wilhelm had gone to bed, and then sent for Isabel, and shut herself up with her in the boudoir.  After Isabel had turned up the knave of hearts eight times running, and she had seen that Wilhelm was in bed, reading the newspaper, she gave Anne and Don Pablo a few orders, dressed hurriedly, and went off, after many kisses and embraces, and with the promise of not staying long.