"This," said the Grand Duke, "is insanity."
"Yet I love better the dreams of the night," de Châteauroux went on; "for they are not made all of memories, sweetheart. Rather, they are romances which my love weaves out of multitudinous memories,--fantastic stories of just you and me that always end, if I be left to dream them out in comfort, very happily. For there is in these dreams a woman who loves me, whose heart and body and soul are mine, and mine alone. Ohé, it is a wonderful vision while it lasts, though it be only in dreams that I am master of my heart's desire, and though the waking be bitter...! Need it be just a dream, Victoria?"
"Not but that he does it rather well, you know," whispered the Grand Duke to the Baroness von Altenburg, "although the style is florid. Yet that last speech was quite in my earlier and more rococo manner."
The Grand Duchess did not stir as de Châteauroux bent over her jewelled hand.
"Come! come now!" he said. "Let us not lose our only chance of happiness. 'Come forth, O Galatea, and forget as thou comest, even as I already have forgot, the homeward way! Nay, choose with me to go a-shepherding--!'"
"Oh, but to think of dragging in Theocritus!" observed his Highness. "Can this be what they call seduction nowadays!"
"I cannot," the Grand Duchess whispered, and her voice trembled. "You know that I cannot, dear."
"A man who leaves you for each new caprice, who flaunts his mistresses in the face of Europe."
"Eh, mon Dieu! are they or aught else to stand in my way, now that I know you love me!"
"--you act a dishonorable part, de Châteauroux,--"
"I will never see you again," said the Grand Duchess, firmly. "Go! I loathe you, I loathe you, monsieur, even more than I loathe myself for having stooped to listen to you."
"You love me!" said de Châteauroux, and took her in his arms.
Then the Grand Duchess rested her head upon the shoulder of de Châteauroux, and breathed, "God help me!--yes!"
"Really," said the Grand Duke, "I would never have thought it of Victoria. It seems incredible for any woman of taste to be thus lured astray by citations of the almanac and secondary Greek poets."
And the Grand Duchess answered, quietly, "It shall be as you will."
More lately, while the Grand Duke and the Baroness craned their necks, and de Châteauroux bent, very slowly, over her upturned lips, the Grand Duchess struggled from him, saying, "Hark, Philippe! for I heard some one--something stirring--"