A grim grunt was all the answer that Mr. Ponsonby vouchsafed.  His conscience, though not his lips, acquitted poor Mary of discontent or pining, as indeed it was the uniform cheerfulness of her demeanour that had misled him into thinking the unfortunate affair forgotten.

He showed no symptoms of speaking again; and Mary, leaning back in her chair, had leisure to recover herself after the many severe strokes that had been made at her.  There was one which she had rebutted valiantly at the moment, but which proved to have been a poisoned dart—­that suggestion that it might be selfish in her not to set Louis even more free, by her own marriage!

She revolved the probabilities:  Clara, formed, guided, supported by himself, the companion of his earlier youth, preferred to all others, and by this time, no doubt, developed into all that was admirable.  What would be more probable than their mutual love?  And when Mary went over all the circumstances of her own strange courtship, she could not but recur to her mother’s original impression, that Louis had not known what he was doing.  Those last weeks had made her feel rather than believe otherwise, but they were far in the distance now, and he had been so young!  It was not unlikely that even yet, while believing himself faithful to her, his heart was in Clara’s keeping, and that the news of her marriage would reveal to them both, in one rush of happiness, that they were destined for each other from the first.

Mary felt intense pain, and yet a strange thrill of joy, to think that Louis might at last be happy.

She drew Clara’s last letter out of her basket, and re-read it, in hopes of some contradiction.  Clara’s letters had all hitherto been stiff.  She had not been acknowledged to be in the secret of Mary’s engagement while it subsisted, and this occasioned a delicacy in writing to her on any subject connected with it; and so the mention of the meeting at the ‘Grand Monarque’ came in tamely, and went off quickly into Lord Ormersfield’s rheumatism and Charlemagne’s tomb.  But the remarkable thing in the letter was the unusual perfume of happiness that pervaded it; the conventional itinerary was abandoned, and there was a tendency to droll sayings—­nay, some shafts from a quiver at which Mary could guess.  She had set all down as the exhilaration of Louis’s presence, but perhaps that exhilaration, was to a degree in which she alone could sympathize.

Mary was no day-dreamer; and yet, ere Rosita’s satin shoe was on the threshold, she had indulged in the melancholy fabric of a castle at Ormersfield, in which she had no share, except the consciousness that it had been her self-sacrifice that had given Louis at last the felicity for which he was so well fitted.