He does not reply, but looks at her with an expression in his eyes which astonishes and troubles her. He is thinking, as the music of her tones stirs his innermost soul, that he can believe no evil of her, will believe none,--no, though the very angels of heaven were to cry out against her. CHAPTER XII. "Where were you all this morning?" asks Lady Usk of her cousin, after luncheon. "I never get up early," returns Gervase. "You know that." "Brandolin was in the home wood with Madame Sabaroff as we returned from church," remarks Dolly Usk. "They were together under a larch-tree. They looked as if they were on the brink of a quarrel or at the end of one: either may be an interesting _rapprochement_." "I dare say they were only discussing some poet. They are always discussing some poet." "Then they had fallen out over the poet. Poets are dangerous themes. Or perhaps she had been showing him your letters, if, as you seem to think, she carries them about with her everywhere like a reliquary." "I never presumed to imagine that she had preserved them for a day." "Oh, yes, you did. You had a vision of her weeping over them in secret every night, until you saw her here and found her as unlike a _délaissé_ as a woman can be." "Certainly she does not look that. Possibly, if Dido could have been dressed by Worth and Rodrigues, had diamonds as big as plovers' eggs, and been adored by Lord Brandolin, she would never have perished in despair. _Autres temps autres m[oe]urs._" He speaks with sullen and scornful bitterness: his handsome face is momentarily flushed. Dorothy Usk looks at him with inquisitiveness: she has never known him fail to rely on his own attractions before. "You are unusually modest," she replies. "Certainly, in our days, if Æneas does not come back, we take somebody else; sometimes we do that even if he does come back." Gervase is moodily silent. "I never knew you 'funk a fence' before!" says his cousin to him, sarcastically. "I have tried to say something to her," replies Gervase, moodily, "but she gives me no hearing, no occasion." "I should have thought you were used well enough to make both for yourself," returns his cousin, with curt sympathy. "You have always been 'master of yourself, though women sigh,'--a paraphrase of Pope at your service." Gervase smiled, conscious of his past successes and willing to acknowledge them. "But you see she does not sigh!" he murmurs, with a sense that the admission is not flattering to his own _amour-propre_. "You have lost the power to make her sigh, do you mean?" "I make no impression on her at all. I am utterly unable to imagine her feelings, her sentiments,--how much she would acknowledge, how much she would ignore." "That is a confession of great helplessness! I should never have believed that you would be baffled by any woman, above all by a woman who once loved you." "It is not easy to make a fire out of ashes."