Moths by Ouida — page 128: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

124 Re et OPER, temperature had affected the health of the Princess Vera; and her husband, who hated Russia with all his might, urged this plea of her health to obtain a reduction of the time he had been ordered to remain on his own lands, and, obtaining what he wish- ed from the Tsar, returned in November to the French Riviera. He had purchased the villa of his sister from her, although it was called still the Villa Nelaguine. He had bought it in a mood of captious irritation with his wife, knowing that to Vere, reared in the cold, gray days and under the cloudy skies and by \the somber seas of the dark North, the Southern seaboard was - oppressive in its languor and its light. Sometimes he liked to hurt her in any way he could: if her child had lived he would have made it into a whip of scorpions for her. Yet he always lavished on her so much money and so many jewels, and kept her so perpetually in the front of the greatest of great worlds, that everybody who knew him said that he made a good husband, after all—much better than any one would have anticipated. He intended to stay at the villa on the Mediterranean for three months, and thither came, self-invited because she was so near —only at Paris—the Lady Dolly. | Neither Zouroff nor his sister ever invited her to their houses, but pretty Lady Dolly was not a woman to-be deterred by so mere a trifle as that. _ “T pine to see my sweet treasure!” she wrote; and Sergius Zouroff, knitting his heavy brows, said, ‘*‘ Let her come,” and Vere said nothing. ‘What an actress was lost in your mother!” he added, with his rough laugh; but he confused the talent of the comedian of so- ciety with that of the comedian of the stage, and they are very dissimilar. The latter almost always forgets herself in her part; the former never. So, one fine, sunlit, balmy day toward Christmas, Lady Dolly drove up through the myrtle wood that led to the Villa Nela- guine, : It was noonday. The house-guests were straying down from up-stairs to breakfast in the pretty Pompelian room, with its in- laid marble walls, and its fountains, and its sculpture, and its banks of hothouse flowers, which opened on to the white terrace. that fronted the rippling blue sea. On this terrace Zouroff was standing. He saw the carriage approaching in the distance through the myrtles, ‘““C’est madame mere,” he said, turning on his heel, and looking one one breakfast-chamber. He laughed a little grimly as he said it. Vere was conversing with Madame Nelaguine, who saw a strange look come into her eyes—aversion, repugnanee, contempt, ain, and shame all commingled. ‘‘ What is there that I do not know?” thought the Princess Nadine. She remembered how Vere had not returned her mother’s embrace at the marriage- ceremony. Sergius Zouroff was still watching the carriage’s approach, _ with that hard smile upon his face which had all the rutality wigs: 2 KT A i . aT SAPD 5 ? A At a ‘J * 7} ~ —% ys / , ; _ ry ‘ A, £ . ney as th it i . i] oe d ¥. : eA aa | ‘ J P UPee «aye tT ' 3Y a7 wi an mh Oe, A Tr 16 ge 7) Hrs oy MS 8