"At least," she murmured, "there is that to remember always."
The Countess of Deringham was sitting alone in her smaller drawing-room, gazing steadfastly at a certain spot in the blazing fire before her. A little pile of grey ashes was all that remained of the sealed packet which she had placed within the bars only a few seconds ago. She watched it slowly grow shapeless--piece after piece went fluttering up the broad chimney. A gentle yet melancholy smile was parting her lips. A chapter of her life was floating away there with the little trembling strips lighter than the air, already hopelessly destroyed. Their disintegration brought with it a sense of freedom which she had lacked for many years. Yet it was only the folly of a girl, the story of a little foolish love-making, which those grey, ashen fragments, clinging so tenaciously to the iron bars, could have unfolded. Lady Deringham was not a woman who had ever for a single moment had cause to reproach herself with any real lack of duty to the brave young Englishman whom she had married so many years ago. It was of those days she was thinking as she sat there waiting for the caller, whose generosity had set her free.
At precisely four o'clock there was the sound of wheels in the drive, the slow movement of feet in the hall, and a servant announced a visitor.
Lady Deringham smiled and greeted him graciously. Mr. Sabin leaned upon his wonderful stick for a moment, and then bent low over Lady Deringham's hand. She pointed to an easy chair close to her own, and he sank into it with some appearance of weariness. He was looking a little old and tired, and he carried himself without any of his usual buoyancy.
"Only a few minutes ago," she said, "I burnt my letters. I was thinking of those days in Paris when the man announced you! How old it makes one feel."
"I am beginning to arrive at the conclusion," he said, "that the poets and the novelists are wrong. It is the man who suffers! Look at my grey hairs!"
"It is only the art of my maid," she said smiling, "which conceals mine. Do not let us talk of the past at all; to think that we lived so long ago is positively appalling!"
"Not so appalling," he answered, "as the thought of how long we still have to live! One regrets one's youth as a matter of course, but the prospect of old age is more terrible still! Lucky those men and those women who live and then die. It is that interregnum--the level, monotonous plain of advancing old age, when one takes the waters at Carlsbad and looks askance at the _entrées_--that is what one has to dread. To watch our own degeneration, the dropping away of our energies, the decline of our taste--why, the tortures of the Inquisition were trifles to it!"