Olga thought for a moment, and assented.  A few minutes afterwards, she was roiling in a cab towards Bryanston Square.

On Monday evening, Piers received a note from Olga.  It ran thus: 

“I warned you not to trust me.  It is all over now; I have, in your own words, ‘put an end to it.’  We could have given no happiness to each other.  Miss Bonnicastle will explain.  Good-bye!”

He went at once to Great Portland Street.  Miss Bonnicastle knew nothing, but looked anxious when she had seen the note and heard its explanation.

“We must wait till the morning,” she said.  “Don’t worry.  It’s just what one might have expected.”

Don’t worry!  Piers had no wink of sleep that night.  At post-time in the morning he was at Miss Bonnicastle’s, but no news arrived.  He went to business; the day passed without news; he returned to Great Portland Street, and there waited for the last postal delivery.  It brought the expected letter; Olga announced her marriage that morning to Mr. Florio.

“It’s better than I feared,” said Miss Bonnicastle.  “Now go home to bed, and sleep like a philosopher.”

Good advice, but not of much profit to one racked and distraught with amorous frenzy, with disappointment sharp as death.  Through the warm spring night, Piers raved and agonised.  The business hour found him lying upon his bed, sunk in dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER XXXII

Again it was springtime—­the spring of 1894.  Two years had gone by since that April night when Piers Otway suffered things unspeakable in flesh and spirit, thinking that for him the heavens had no more radiance, life no morrow.  The memory was faint; he found it hard to imagine that the loss of a woman he did not love could so have afflicted him.  Olga Hannaford—­Mrs. Florio—­was matter for a smile; he hoped that he might some day meet her again, and take her hand with the old friendliness, and wish her well.

He had spent the winter in St. Petersburg, and was making arrangements for a visit to England, when one morning there came to him a letter which made his eyes sparkle and his heart beat high with joy.  In the afternoon, having given more than wonted care to his dress, he set forth from the lodging he occupied at the lower end of the Nevski Prospect, and walked to the Hotel de France, near the Winter Palace, where he inquired for Mrs. Borisoff.  After a little delay, he was conducted to a private sitting-room, where again he waited.  On a table lay two periodicals, at which he glanced, recognising with a smile recent numbers of the Nineteenth Century and the Vyestnik Evropy.

There entered a lady with a bright English face, a lady in the years between youth and middle age, frank, gracious, her look of interest speaking a compliment which Otway found more than agreeable.

“I have kept you waiting,” she said, in a tone that dispensed with formalities, “because I was on the point of going out when they brought your card——­”