WITH what a world of excellent intentions Otto entered his wife’s cabinet! how fatherly, how tender! how morally affecting were the words he had prepared! Nor was Seraphina unamiably inclined. Her usual fear of Otto as a marplot in her great designs was now swallowed up in a passing distrust of the designs themselves. For Gondremark, besides, she had conceived an angry horror. In her heart she did not like the Baron¹. Behind his impudent² servility, behind the devotion which, with indelicate delicacy³, he still forced on her attention, she divined the grossness of his nature. So a man may be proud of having tamed a bear, and yet sicken at his captive’s odour. And above all, she had certain jealous intimations that the man was false and the deception⁴ double. True, she falsely trifled with his love; but he, perhaps, was only trifling⁵ with her vanity. The insolence⁶ of his late mimicry⁷, and the odium of her own position as she sat and watched it, lay besides like a load upon her conscience. She met Otto almost with a sense of guilt⁸, and yet she welcomed him as a deliverer from ugly things.

But the wheels of an interview are at the mercy of a thousand ruts; and even at Otto’s entrance, the first jolt⁹ occurred. Gondremark, he saw, was gone; but there was the chair drawn¹⁰ close for consultation¹¹; and it pained him not only that this man had been received, but that he should depart with such an air of

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