Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/227

 certainly, without having seen your chapel. Au revoir."

"If you do leave, Madame, I follow!—to paint the ball-room."

He shut the carriage-door, and stood bare-headed in the wintry wind as the impatient horses dashed away. When it had disappeared he put his hat on, lighted a cigar, and strolled to his own house.

"She will not go to Paris," he said to himself. He knew women well.

In an hour and a half she arrived at his own gates, bringing the Princess Olga with her.

She saw the grand old garden, the mighty staircases, the courts that once held troops of armed men; she saw his own rooms, with their tapestries that Flemish John Rosts had had the doing of so many centuries before; she saw the exquisite dim silent chapel, whose walls, painted by the Memmi in one portion and continued by Masaccio, were amongst the famous things of the city. She was moved and saddened; softened too; after all, the decay of a great race has an unutterable pathos; it will touch even a vulgar mind;