“Do you think any man could ever come between me and the memory of my brother?” she demanded passionately--“between my duty to his memory, to his unfinished work? Do you think that I could ever admire, love, respect any man one-half so well? What of his weaknesses? He had the greatest of natures. He knew that he had the fate of Europe in his hands, and he would have made the soberest of rulers. Do you think that any woman was ever so fortified as I against the common weakness of woman? Rudolf!--Austria!--” She turned abruptly and walked down the dim path under the wall. Alexandra caught her breath. She felt curiously uncomfortable, as a sensitive American girl, unskilled in feeling, always does at the sudden revelation of passion in another woman. Calmly to analyze the passions of the world, and stare ironically at the complications of life through a lorgnette, was all in the mental progress of a girl brought up with the peculiar advantages of Alexandra and possessing her uncommon acuteness; but direct contact vaguely offended the cool purity of her lighter nature. She also experienced a sensation of terror which vibrated oddly among her calm and calculating particles. Should she write and tell Fessenden to go at once? Or--might it not be merely Ranata’s imagination that had taken fire? Impossible that she could love a man with whom she had not exchanged ten words; who to his sister’s critical eye had looked like anything but a god with his shirt hanging over his skirts, and sweating like any crimson peasant in the room--she had sent Zrinyi out immediately to wash his face. No, she decided, after a few moments of hard maidenly thinking, it was merely the romantic streak in that abundant dreaming nature that had claimed dominion for the moment--aggravated no doubt by much retrospection and idealizing since; the occasion and Fessenden, to Alexandra’s mind, stood in need of at least three days’ perspective and created glamour. But should she send away Fessenden and leave Ranata at peace with her dead and her duties? She hardly had realized what she expected to result upon the meeting of these two. A vague and picturesque drama, mixed with much history, with a final prophetic vision of the two in New York, had whirled through her head. Passion, suffering, tragedy--she had given them no thought, well as she knew Ranata’s capacity for all. Her friend had been the heroine of many romances woven by her energetic brain; but the romances had been creations of an exalted and poetic nature, like unto what she assumed the gods and goddesses had compassed.