His silence frightened her.  With an instinctive jealousy she saw that her words had started a train of thought in which she had no part.  She felt herself ignored, abandoned; and all her passions rushed to the defence of her wounded vanity.

“Oh, believe me,” she cried, “I speak as your Duchess, not as your wife.  That is a name in which I should never dream of appealing to you.  I have ever stood apart from your private pleasures, as became a woman of my house.”  She faced him with a flash of the Austrian insolence.  “But when I see the state drifting to ruin as the result of your caprice, when I see your own life endangered, your people turned against you, religion openly insulted, law and authority made the plaything of this—­this—­false atheistical creature, that has robbed me—­robbed me of all—­” She broke off helplessly and hid her face with a sob.

Odo stood speechless, spell-bound.  He could not mistake what had happened.  The woman had surged to the surface at last—­the real woman, passionate, self-centred, undisciplined, but so piteous, after all, in this sudden subjection to the one tenderness that survived in her.  She loved him and was jealous of her rival.  That was the instinct which had swept all others aside.  At that moment she cared nothing for her safety or his.  The state might perish if they but fell together.  It was the distance between them that maddened her.

The tragic simplicity of the revelation left Odo silent.  For a fantastic moment he yielded to the vision of what that waste power might have accomplished.  Life seemed to him a confusion of roving force that met only to crash in ruins.

His silence drew her to her feet.  She repossessed herself, throbbing but valiant.

“My fears for your Highness’s safety have led my speech astray.  I have given your Highness the warning it was my duty to give.  Beyond that I had no thought of trespassing.”

And still Odo was silent.  A dozen answers struggled to his lips; but they were checked by the stealing sense of duality that so often paralysed his action.  He had recovered his lucidity of vision, and his impulses faded before it like mist.  He saw life again as it was, an incomplete and shabby business, a patchwork of torn and ravelled effort.  Everywhere the shears of Atropos were busy, and never could the cut threads be joined again.

He took his wife’s hand and bent over it ceremoniously.  It lay in his like a stone.

4.8.

The jubilee of the Mountain Madonna fell on the feast of the Purification.  It was mid-November, but with a sky of June.  The autumn rains had ceased for the moment, and fields and orchards glistened with a late verdure.