The _suisse_ told her that Othmar had not come home.
She went upstairs to her boudoir and threw off her close-fitting-coat of sables and her sable hat, and sat down beside the olive-wood fire, drawing off her long gloves. The room was softly lighted with a rose-tinted light which shone on the gay children painted by Bougereau, the flowered satin of the curtains and couches, the Dresden frames of the mirrors, the marqueterie of the tables and consoles, the bouquets of roses of all growths and colours. She looked round it with a little sigh; with the same sense of chillness and sadness. Everything in it seemed to echo the cruel words: 'He only married you to anger her!'
In the morning the whole chamber had seemed to smile at her from all the thousand trifles, which spoke in it of his tender thoughtfulness for herself; now, the roses in their bowls, the children on their panels, the amorini holding up the mirrors, the green parrots swinging in their rings, all seemed to say with one voice, 'What if he never loved you?'
Her arms rested on her knees and her face on her hands, as she sat in a low chair before the fire which burned under white marble friezes of the Daphnephoria, carved by the hand of Clésinger. She could never ask him, she could never ask any one, of this cruel doubt, which had come into her perfect peace as a worm comes into a rose. All her pride shrank from the thought of laying bare such a wound. Not even in the confessional could she have brought herself to breathe a whisper of it. She was not yet seventeen years old, and she had already a doubt which, like the pains of maternity, she must shut in her heart and bear as best she might alone. She had both courage and resignation in her nature, and she needed both.
'It is impossible!' she murmured unconsciously, half aloud, as the memory of a thousand caresses and gestures, which seemed to her to be proof of the most absolute love, came to her thoughts with irresistible persuasion, and made her face grow warm with blushes even in her solitude. It was impossible that he did not love her--he who had been free to choose from the whole world.
'It is impossible!' she murmured, with her head lifted as though in some instinct of combat against some unseen foe.