health, which the doctor pronounced to be not only good, but even excellent. Another celebrated Prague physician whom she consulted about the matter entirely agreed with his colleague in the country.
Jenny had told the young Baroness Sály, before she left, that she was going direct to Vienna, so she fell as completely into oblivion at the castle as if water had closed over her. In the mean time she moved secretly to Smíchov, a suburb of Prague, distant from the centre of the capital, where the baron had taken care to have comfortable lodgings provided for her. He came there occasionally to see her, but it did not escape her that soon some strange and undefinable change had taken place in his bearing towards her. This disturbed her so much, that she determined on seizing the very first opportunity that offered to obtain some certainty as to the future of herself and her child. This filled her mind so completely that she hardly thought of anything else, and, being of a strong and energetic nature, preferred knowing the worst at once from the baron’s own mouth, to remaining any longer in painful uncertainty. How matters turned out between them we already know.
The baron did not stand the test. Jenny condemned and repudiated him, and decided on taking up her burden and going through life alone, in dependence on her own strength of mind and will, rather than commit her fate and that of her beloved child to his wavering, dependent mind and unreliable character.
While he was abroad, Baron Mundy did not write to Jenny. He hoped and trusted that time, the great healer of all wounds, and the being left entirely to herself, would in the end bring her round, so that in a few weeks she would see the necessity of opening her mind to listen to
