MOTHS.
73
properties of a theater for her jewels," he said,
In .'a thick, hoarse voice. "As I have treated
that jewel, so I will treat the man if ever you
let him enter your presence again.   You hear?"
" I hear."
All color had gone from her lips, but her face
remained cold and calm.
"Well?" said her husband, roughly, already
in a measure ashamed of his violence, as the
diamond star covered the carpet benenth his feet
with sparkling atoms.
" What do you want me to say? I am your
wife, and you can offend me in any way, and I
cannot resent it. There is no use in saying
what I think of that."
He was silent, and in a measure subdued.
He knew very well that his violence had been
cowardly and unworthy, that he had disgraced
his name and place, that he had been a coward
and no gentleman. His new-born sense of fear
and of veneration of her struggled with his in-
censed vanity and his irritated suspicions.
"Vere," he muttered, only half aloud, "be-
fore God, if you would let me, I could love you
now!"
She shuddered.
" Spare me that, at least!"
He understood, and was silenced. He glanc-
ed at her longingly, sullenly, furtively. The
shattered jewel lay at his feet,
"What is that singer to you?" he said,
abruptly.
" A man who honors me.    You do not.
"Were he only of my rank I would insult
bim, and shoot him dead."
Vere was silent.
" What do you say?" he muttered, impatient
of her silence.
"He is of your rank, and he can defend him-
self. His hand is clean, and so also is his con-
science."
" Will you swear he is no lover of yours?
Her eyes flashed, but she took the book of
prayer lying on her table, kissed it, and said,—
"I swear that certainly."
Then she laid the book down, and, with an
accent he had never heard from her, she turned
suddenly on him, in a passion of indignation
that transformed her coldness into fire.
"How dare you? how dare you?" she said,
with a vibration in her voice that he had never
heard there. " Now that you have done me the
last insult that a man can pass upon his wife, be
satisfied, and go."                                   .
Than she put her hand out, and pointed to
the door.
He lingered, dazed and fascinated by that
new power in her glance, that new meaning in
her voice.
" Women change like that when they love,
he said to her, aloud.   "Areyou not of the new
school then?   You know very well you have
no fidelity from me.   Why should you be faith-
ful to me?   They say you need not be."
She still seemed to him transfigured and risen
above him ; her fair face had the glow of holy
scorn, of just wrath, still on it.
'¦' Are your sins the measures of my duty?
«he said, with unutterable contempt. " Do you
think if it were only for you, for you, that I
were decent in my life and true to my obliga-
tion I should not years ago have failed and
been the vilest thing that lives? You do not
-understand. Have you never heard of self re-
spect, of honor, and of God?"
The words touched him, and the look upon
her face awed him for an instant into belief in
her and belief in Heaven ; but against his in-
stinct and against his faith the long habit of a
brutal cynicism and a mocking doubtrprevailed,
and the devil in him, that had so- long hved
with the vile and the foolish of his world, drove
¦him to answer her with a bitter sneer.
"Your words are grand," he said to her,
" and I believe you mean them. Yes, you do
not lie. But those fine things, my princess,
may last so long as a woman is untempted.
But so long only. You are all Eve's daugh-
ters!"
Then he bowed and left her. He hated him-
self for the thing he had said, but he could not
have staid the devil in him that uttered it. If
his wife betrayed him that night, he knew that
he would have no title to condemn her; yet he
thought, as he went from her presence, if she
did,—if she did,—he would slit the throat of
her singing-bird, or of any other man, if any
other it were.
Vere stood erect, a somber disgust and revolt
. in her eyes.    Her  husband had said to her,
" Thou fool! all sin alike; do thou likewise.
In a few moments she stooped and raised the
fragments of the jewels and the twisted and
broken goldsmith's work. It was all shattered
except the sapphire moth.
She shut the moth and all the shining brilliant
dust in a secret drawer of her jewel-case, then
rang for her women. In another twenty min-
utes she entered her carriage, and drove in si-
lence .with her husband beside her to the Rue
de Grenelle.
" Le Prince et la Princesse Zouroff !" shouted
tlie lackeys, standing in a gorgeous line down
the staircase of the embassy.
CHAPTER XXV.
It was an April night when the necklace of
the moth and the star perished under the heel
of Zouroff ; there were two months more through
which the life in Paris lasted, for Zouroff adored
the boulevards, even in summer months; the
asphalte had a power to charm him that even
the grass of his forest drives never rivaled, and
the warm nights of spring and early summer
found him driving down the Champs Elysées
to and fro his various haunts, his carriage-lamps
adding two stars the more to its long river of
light.
Coming home in the full dayiight from his
pleasures, he would at times meet his wife go-
ing out in the clear hours of the early forenoon.
He asked her once, roughly, where she was go-
ing, and she told him, naming the poorest quar-
ter on the other side of the Seine.
"Why do you go to such a place?" he asked
her, as she stood on the staircase.
" There are poor there, aud great misery," she
answered him, reluctantly: she did not care to
peak of these things at any time.
" And what good will you do? You will be
cheated and robbed; and, even if you are not,
you should know that political science has
found that private charity is the hot bed of all
idleness."
' ' When political science has advanced enough
to prevent poverty, it may have the right to
prevent charity, too," she answered him, with
a contempt that showed thought on the theme
was not new to her. " Perhaps charity—1 dis-
like the word—may do no good; but friendship
from the rich to the poor must do good; it must
lessen class hatreds."
"Are you a socialist?" said Zouroff, with a
little laugh, and he drew back and let her pass
onward. They were the first words he had
spoken to her alone since the night he had de-
stroyed the necklace, and even now they were
not unheard: for there were half a score of serv-
ants on -the stairs and in the vestibule below.
Vere went out to her little brougham in the
fresh air of the warm lilac-scented morning as
the clock struck ten.
Her husband took his way to his own set of
rooms, rich with Oriental stuffs and weapons,
and heavy with the fumes of tobacco. He
thought of what his sister had said of Saint
Elizabeth and the roses of Paradise; he thought,
too, of what Jeanne de Sonnaz had said. Hi»
wife was greatly changed.
She seemed to him to have aged ten years aU
suddenly,—not iu the fair beauty of her face,
but in her regard, in her tone, in her look. Was
she like the young royal saint of Hungary, or
was she like all women, as he knew them?   He
had the careless, half-conscious, but profound
belief in depravity that is the note of the cen-
tury:   he thought all women coquines.    That
his wife was different from the rest he had be-
lieved; but that shewas incapable of deceiving
him he was in noway sure.    Sooner or later
they all went the same road, so he thought. He
began to doubt that she told him the truth as to
these errands of her morning hours; his sister
believed in them indeed, but what should his
sister know, who was never out of her bed till
noon was past?
Vere had no physical fear, and at times she
penetrated into the darkest and roughest quar-
ters of Paris,—the quarters that belch out those
hidden multitudes that make revolution anarchy
and shatter in dust and blood the visions of pa-
triots But she was safe there, though once she
heard one man say to another "Diantre! what
a sMit it would be, that lovely head on a scaf-
fold " She turned and looked at him with a
smile: " I think I should know how to die, my
friend; are vou quite sure that you would?"
As this worst form of suspicion, that of the
tyrants, grew upon him, he did what he knew
was low and vile and beneath him: he had her
watched in these daily hours of absence. He
excused his vigilance to those who had the task
by the expression of his fears for her safety
from the rude and ferocious classes among
whom she went. They brought him the weekly
report of all she did, minute by minute, in all
its trifling details: the courage and the self-sac-
rifice of that thankless labor, the self-devotion
and patience of that charity, were before him in
a chronicle she would never have written her-
self. He was astonished ; he was ashamed. The
superstition that underlies the worldy wisdom
of the aristocratic Russian, as it permeates the
kindly stupidity of the Russian peasant, began
to stir in him.'and trouble him. He began to
think she was a holy creature. Though he had
no faith, he had that vague religious fear which
often survives the death of all religious beliefs,
with those who have been educated in strict
rituals, as he had been.
When June came they went to Félicité. It
was the same thing every year. The world went
with them. To her it seemed always as if they
were perpetually on the stage before an au-
dience: the audience varied, but the play was
always the same.
She would have given ten years of her life for
a few weeks' rest, silence, solitude, _ with
" plain living and high thinking," and time to
watch the clouds, the showers, the woodlands.-
the ways of birds and beasts, the loves of the*
bees aud the flowers. But she never had one
day even to herself. There was always on her
ear the murmur of society,—always, Hke the
shadow on the sundial, some duty that was
called pleasure, obscuring each hour as it came.
It was a bright Norman summer, the weather
clear and buoyant, the country a sea of apple-
blossoms. Once or twice she got away by her-
self, and went to the little cluster of cabins on
the head of the cliffs beyond Villerville. The
old woman was there,—always knitting, always
with a white cap and a blue linen gown, against
the wall of furze.
" The lark is dead," she said, with a shake
of the head. "It was no fault of mine, my
princess; a boy with a stone one day—ah! ah!
—how shall I tell the gt-ntleman when he comes?
He has not been yet this summer; he was
here in midwinter,—oh, quite midwinter,—and
he said he was going away into the North
somewhere. Jesu-Maria! the heaps of cent-
sous pieces he gave me to take care of that
lark!"
The shrewd old woman under the white roof
of her cap watched the face of her "princess."
"I want to know if she cares too," she thought.
" But that beautiful angel could not fail to be
loved."
Vera went away slowly through the high
grove, even under the shade of the apple-blos-
soms. How long ago—it seemed long as a
century since she had been the child listening,
with her heart in her eyes, to the song of the
lark that was dead !
Her husband said to her sharply that day
after her return, "Where were you this morn-
ing?    You were hours away."
"I drove to Villerville," she answered him.
" There is a shrine near there, I think?" added
Madame Jeanne, with apparent simplicity.
The somber thoughts of Zouroff taught hei
that.
"I know of no remarkable shrine, replied
Vere, who did not imagine any double meaning
in the words. ' ' There is none nearer than Val
d.6 Grâce
Her husband was silent. The duchess rose,
and hummed a little song then being sung by
Jane Hading:  Vous voulez vous moquer de moi.
This vear Madame Jeanne staid at Félicité.
Why no't? She had her little girls Berthe and
Claire with her, and her husband came now and
then, and would come for a longer time when
the bosquets of pheasants would begin to fall
in the drives of the park.
" Pourquoi pas?" she had said, when Zouroff
had begged her !o stay in his house, instead of
taking a villa at TrouviUe.
" You would not last year," he said, with a
man's stupidity.
"Last year was last year," said the duchess,
dryly; and she came over, and had all the south
wing 'of the château for herself and her Berthe
and Claire and their governesses. She was
really fond of her children.
The papers of that day spoke of Corrèze. He
was in Stockholm.
"That is far enough: she cannot have met
him," thought the duchess. "Villerville
must be a ijjlgrimage of remembrance.    There