Moths by Ouida — page 239: what you’re looking at

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

MOTHS. | f 2355 he ever will, though; if he have any political faith at all, he is a Legitimist—if he be not a Communist. But I don’t think he thinks about those things. He told me once that nightingales do not build either in new stucco or in old timber—that they only wanted a bush of rose-laurel. He is a mortel fantasque, you know, and people have spoiled him. He is very vain, and he thinks himself a Sultan.” All the while the duchess was studying narrowly her compan- ion as she spoke. Vere, without any apparent attention to it, put her edelweiss in an old gold hunting-goblet that she had bought that mornin in one of the little dark shops of Ischl; and the duchess could tell nothing from her face. In her heart Vere felt asense of irritation and disappointment. The note seemed to her flippant, the homage of it insincere, and his departure unnecessary and a slight. She did not know that he wanted to turn aside from her the suspicion of a woman in whom he foresaw a perilous foe for her, and that to disarm worldly perils he used worldly weapons. Vere no more under- stood that than one of Chaucer’s heroines, with straight glaive and simple shield, would have understood the tactics of a game of Kriegspiel. : And why did he go? She was far from dreaming that he went to avoid her. The song of Heine did not mean to her all that it meant to him. That she had some place in his memory, some hold on his inter- est, she thought—but nothing more; and even that she almost doubted now; how could he write of her to Jeanne de Sonnaz. A cold and cruel fear that she had deceived herself in trusting him seized. on her; she heard of him always as capricious, as un- staple, as vain; who could tell, she thought? Perhaps she had only given him food for vanity and for laughter. Perhaps his seriousness and his sympathy had been but a mere passing mood, an emotion, no more real than those he assumed so perfectly upon his stage. | The doubt hurt her cruelly, and did not stay long with her, for her soul was too noble to harbor distrust. Yetat her ear Jeanne de Sonnaz perpetually dropped slight words, little stories, shrewd hints, that all made him the center of adventures as varied and as little noble as those of any hero of amorous com- edy. Ever and again a chill sickening doubt touched her, that she, at once the proudest and the humblest woman in the world, had been the amusement of an hour to a brilliant but shallow persifieur. She carried the gold goblet with the edelweiss of the Thorstein into her own chamber, and, when quite alone, she burst into tears. She never shed tears now. It had seemed to her as if they were scorched up by the arid desolation of her life. They did her good like dew in drought. So much she owed Correze. Correze himself at that hour—having taken leave at daybreak of the Imperial hunter and his courtly companions, who were returning into Ischl—was walking by his guide’s side down the — face of the Dachstein towards the g:cen Rauris range, meaning — EO mre 00 cS co