Thus he delivered himself, with cold hate in his white, flabby,
frog-face and in the very poise of his squat, ungainly figure.

Thereafter he departed for Berlin, bearing hate of her with him,
and leaving hate and despair behind.

It was then, in this despair, that Sophia looked about her for a
true friend to lend her the aid she so urgently required; to
rescue her from her intolerable, soul-destroying fate. And at her
elbow, against this dreadful need, Destiny had placed her
sometime playmate, her most devoted friend--as she accounted
him, and as, indeed, he was--the elegant, reckless Koenigsmark,
with his beautiful face, his golden mane, and his unfathomable
blue eyes.

Walking with him one summer day between clipped hedges in the
formal gardens of Herrenhausen--that palace as squat and
ungraceful as those who had built and who inhabited it--she
opened her heart to him very fully, allowed him, in her
overwhelming need of sympathy, to see things which for very shame
she had hitherto veiled from all other eyes. She kept nothing
back; she dwelt upon her unhappiness with her boorish husband,
told him of slights and indignities innumerable, whose pain she
had hitherto so bravely dissembled, confessed, even, that he had
beaten her upon occasion.

Koenigsmark went red and white by turns, with the violent surge of
his emotions, and the deep sapphire eyes blazed with wrath when
she came at last to the culminating horror of blows endured.