Meanwhile between himself and any better understanding of her stood the remembrance of their talk in the hunting-lodge of Pontesordo.  What she had offered then he had refused to take:  was she the woman to forget such a refusal?  Was it not rather to keep its memory alive that she had married him?  Or was she but the flighty girl he had once imagined her, driven hither and thither by spasmodic impulses, and incapable of consistent action, whether for good or ill?  The barrier of their past—­of all that lay unsaid and undone between them—­so completely cut her off from him that he had, in her presence, the strange sensation of a man who believes himself to be alone yet feels that he is watched...The first months of their marriage were oppressed by this sense of constraint; but gradually habit bridged the distance between them and he found himself at once nearer to her and less acutely aware of her.  In the second year an heir was born and died; and the hopes and grief thus shared drew them insensibly into the relation of the ordinary husband and wife, knitted together at the roots in spite of superficial divergencies.

In his passionate need of sympathy and counsel Odo longed to make the most of this enforced community of interests.  Already his first zeal was flagging, his belief in his mission wavering:  he needed the encouragement of a kindred faith.  He had no hope of finding in Maria Clementina that pure passion for justice which seemed to him the noblest ardour of the soul.  He had read it in one woman’s eyes, but these had long been turned from him.  Unconsciously perhaps he counted rather on his wife’s less generous qualities:  the passion for dominion, the blind arrogance of temper that, for the mere pleasure of making her power felt, had so often drawn her into public affairs.  Might not this waste force—­which implied, after all, a certain prodigality of courage—­be used for good as well as evil?  Might not his influence make of the undisciplined creature at his side an unconscious instrument in the great work of order and reconstruction?

His first appeal to her brought the answer.  At his request his ministers had drawn up a plan of financial reorganisation, which should include the two duchies; for Monte Alloro, though wealthier than Pianura, was in even greater need of fiscal reform.  As a first step towards replenishing the treasury the Duke had declared himself ready to limit his private expenditure to a fixed sum; and he now asked the Duchess to pledge herself in the same manner.  Maria Clementina, since her uncle’s death, had been in receipt of a third of the annual revenues of Monte Alloro.  This should have enabled her to pay her debts and put some dignity and order into her establishment; but the first year’s income had gone in the building of a villa on the Piana, in imitation of the country-seats along the Brenta; the second was spent in establishing a menagerie of wild animals like that of the French Queen at Versailles; and rumour had it that the Duchess carried her imitation of her royal cousin so far as to be involved in an ugly quarrel with her jewellers about a necklace for which she owed a thousand ducats.