"What was natural?" "That she should console herself." "Ah! she did console herself?" Litroff smiles. "Ask Lord Gervase: he was Lord Baird at that time. We all expected he would have married her when Sabaroff was shot." "But it was Lustoff who shot Sabaroff in a duel about her?" "Not about her. Lustoff quarrelled with him about a gambling affair, not about her at all, though people have said so. Lord Baird--Gervase--was, I am certain, her first lover, and has been her only one, as yet." Brandolin flings his book with some violence on the floor, gets up, and walks to the window. Mr. Wootton looks after him. "No one could blame her," says Litroff, who is a good-natured man. "She was married when she was scarcely sixteen to a brute; she was immensely admired; she was alone in the midst of a society both loose and brilliant; Gervase laid siege to her sans trêve, and she was hardly more than a child." "Where there is no principle early implanted," begins Mr. Wootton---- But Litroff is not patient under preaching. "My dear sir," he says, impatiently, "principle (of that kind) is more easily implanted in plain women than in handsomer ones. Madame Sabaroff is a proud woman, which comes to nearly the same thing as a high-principled one. She has lived like a saint since Sabaroff was shot, and if she take up matters with her early lover again it will only be, I imagine, this time, _pour le bon motif_. Anyhow, I don't see why we should blame her for the past, when the present shows us such an admirable and edifying spectacle as miladi Waverley and miladi Usk going to sit in church with George Usk between them!" Whereon the Russian secretary takes a "Figaro" off the newspaper-table, and rudely opens it and flourishes it between Mr. Wootton and himself, in sign that the conversation is ended. Mr. Wootton has never been so treated in his life. CHAPTER XI. Brandolin walks down the opening between the glass doors into the garden. He paces impatiently the green shady walks where he has seen her on other mornings than this. It is lovely weather, and the innumerable roses fill the warm moist air with fragrance. There is a sea-breeze blowing from the sea-coast some thirty miles away; his schooner is in harbor there; he thinks that it would be wisest to go to it and sail away again for as many thousand miles as he has just left behind him. Xenia Sabaroff has a great and growing influence over him, and he does not wish her to exercise it and increase it if this thing be true: perhaps, after all, she may be that kind of sorceress of which Mary Stuart is the eternal type,--cold only that others may burn, _reculant pour mieux sauter_, exquisitely feminine only to be more dangerously powerful. He does not wish to play the _rôle_ of Chastelard, or of Douglas, or of Henry Darnley. He is stung to the quick by what he has heard said.