The hopes that rise insistent in the cold discouraging mind when the first shock and depression have run their course have their origin, no doubt, in the subterranean chambers of the brain; mean, when it is a case of outraged love, that the soul is continuing its eternal struggle for completion with another soul. These are immemorial rights, and do not endure disintegration and change every seven years.

Margarethe had passed through many phases, not only since the night she had heard of Ordham’s engagement, but since the beginning of her deliberate correspondence with him. As is commonly the case, she found more satisfaction in the writing of her own letters than in the reading of his; although that excited, hopeful, terrified, tremulous, forlorn waiting for the post was a new and astounding experience. Men, the cleverest of them, are indifferent letter writers, and Ordham was no exception. A woman lets her pen run on with a freedom and felicity which conscious art but intensifies, the while it exercises selection and restraint. But men are prone to say what they have to say in the fewest possible words, rather rejecting all subjects but the essential than wandering afield in search of others that might make their compositions interesting.

Although Styr, in a manner, enjoyed this correspondence even more deeply than her personal intercourse with the man who had strolled into her inner kingdom and taken possession (for it gave her a sense of greater intimacy, liberated her imagination), she was too wise to give alarm to his limited amount of masculine endurance by writing him twenty pages when she was artistically capable of packing news, gossip, personalities, disquisitions upon books, the opera, the drama, and politics, into ten. Nor, although she longed to write daily, did she gratify this new passion oftener than once a week; and even so, she cultivated a certain irregularity, that the assured appearance of a too familiar envelope on his morning tray might not in time inspire him with that nervous irritability which so often takes shape in ennui. Not for nothing had she been forced to accept man as her chief study before Wagner transposed her from life to art; but she hated these restraints, longed to be natural. She knew, however, that, given a man of Ordham’s temperament, only nature heightened by art could hold him, never nature unbridled and ingenuous.

Ordham’s disposition was so far from frank that although while within her magnetic radius he had been more confidential and revealing than he had ever been before, he could not shed his diplomatic shell with nothing but a sheet of paper before him, headed “Dear Countess Tann.” Moreover, with all his soul he hated letter writing, and only answered these fascinating epistles with a reasonable promptness for the sake of others to come. If she had tacitly agreed to write alone, he would have been completely happy. And she, of course, wanted a running picture of his daily life at Ordham, of the companies assembled there, of trivial but always interesting personalities and incidents. But he could as easily have written a book; the bare suggestion would have appalled him; and, while making his letters as short as decency would permit, he confined himself to a brief comment upon the literary and artistic people invited to the castle, music, and books—he sent her many new ones—and devoted the last page to herself, expressing his desire to see her again, and his regret that their summer had been all too short. Sometimes she smiled at these laborious epistles, and sometimes she flung them across the room and stamped her foot. She had to read them over and over to extract any comfort out of them; then, finally, she succeeded in reading between the lines, rewrote them, in short, as women will.

There were times when she intensely disliked him for his apostasy to herself, his weakness in being blindly steered into a commonplace attack of puppy love when he should have risen superior to the follies of youth and gone unscathed till thirty, then loved some one worthy of him. She hurled him from his pedestal and rolled him in the dirt, announcing that he belonged there, delighted with the sense of emancipation that permeated to her finger tips. Not even yet did her mind dwell upon the possibility of any closer union with him; she dreamed only of the insatiable mysterious immaterial tie; she indulged herself in attacks of bitterness, of furious regret that he had not so ordered his life that she might think of him always as the exceptional man, instead of seeing, against her will, a vision of a love-sick white-faced youth, idiotically in love with a pretty girl, then as a fatuous young husband complacent to all the selfish whims of his bride; drifting with her on a river of gold that threatened to rise and suffocate what energies he had. If he must be “managed,” she was the woman for this office, for she would have steered him to greater goals. She was a thorough woman, was Margarethe Styr, but her saving grace was that she knew it. When she laughed at herself, then was Ordham forgiven, excused, dusted off, and restored to his pedestal, his sovereignty in the realm of the ideal.

When there crept into his letters—after the return of his household to London—a tinge of sadness, deepening at times into melancholy, more than a hint of impatience at enforced inertia, at passing opportunities; when his polite desire to see her again began to vibrate with something like passion, then did she understand that not only was he tiring of his wife, but that her own letters, with their insidious but unremitting spur to his ambitions, were reaping the harvest she had planned. It was after one of these letters of his, longer than usual, more personal, asserting that could he but find a decent excuse, could he but exercise his freedom at this time without brutality, he would take the next train for Munich, that a voice seemed to cry through her brain: “Let him alone! Let him alone! In silence and absence men forget.” This spasm of conscience brought her face to face with a good many possible results that she had ignored; and as she really loved him and was fairly consistent in her desire to see him happy and great, she delayed her answer to this letter, half resolving to drop the correspondence.

Then, a week later, arrived a letter charged with a curious hotchpotch of anger and jubilance, an astonished sense of semi-defeat and almost royal triumph. He had not given her a hint of his scheme to organize a season of Wagner opera at Covent Garden, for, although hopeful at the first, he had met, upon his return to London, with so many objections and difficulties, so much ignorance, prejudice, and pharisaical folly, that he had at times despaired of attaining an object which opposition fanned into a passion. But, calling to his aid older and more influential men than himself, the last barrier had finally gone down, and although he could not hire the opera house for the season, owing to other contracts, he had succeeded in capturing it for five w............