Page:Wanda, by Ouida.djvu/13

4 did it matter what cause had led him to avoid political life?—he loved her so well.

The following month they were in Paris, having found an hotel in the Boulevard St. Germain, standing in a great sunny garden; and when they were fairly installed there, the Princess and the children and the horses followed them, and their arrival made an event of great interest and importance in the city which of all others in the world it is hardest thus to impress. The Countess von Szalras, a notability always, was celebrated just then as the inheritress of the coveted Noira collection, which it had been fondly hoped would have gone to the hammer: and Sabran, popular always, and not forgotten here, where most things and people are forgotten in a week, was courted, flattered, and welcomed by men and by women; and as he rode down the Allée des Acacias, or entered the Mirlitons, he felt himself at home. His beautiful wife, his beautiful children, his incomparable horses, his marvellous good fortune were the talk of all those who had already left their country-houses for the winter rentrée,and attained a publicity, beginning with the great Szalras pearls and ending with the babies' white donkeys, which was the great est of all possible offences to her; she abhorred and