They passed through a small village. The chimneys of some of the white clay hovels on either side of the road poured out clouds of sweetish, nauseating smoke. Wood being scarce in these parts, the peasantry made fuel of manure.
At last the sleigh swung into the great front yard of Pani Oginska’s manor house. It was greeted by the curious eyes of half a dozen servants. Pavel entered a warm vestibule with a painted floor, where he found waiting to meet him Pani Oginska and an aged man with hair as white as the snow without. He bowed politely and asked, in French, with nervous timidity:
“Do you remember me, Madame Oginska?”
She screwed up her eyes as she scanned his flushed, frozen face.
“Prince Boulatoff!” she said in a perplexed whisper.
“I have come all the way from St. Petersburg to beg your pardon, Madame Oginska,” he fired out. “I acted like a brute on that occasion. I was an idiotic boy. Forgive me.”
“Have you actually come all the way from St. Petersburg, to tell me that?” she asked with a hearty peal of laughter. She introduced him to the white-haired man, her father, who first made a bow full of old-fashioned dignity and then gave Pavel’s cold hand a doddering grasp.
“So you have really come for that express purpose?” Pani Oginska resumed, while a servant was relieving the newcomer of his fur-lined coat, fur cap, heavy gloves, muffler and storm shoes. “A case of compunction, I suppose?”
Her father followed them as far as the open door of a vast, plainly furnished parlour, and after looming on the threshold for a minute or two, in an attitude of pained dignity, he bowed himself away. Pani Oginska gently pressed the young man into a huge, rusty easy-chair, she herself remaining in a standing posture, her mind apparently divided between hospitality and an important errand upon which she seemed to have been bent when he arrived. She wore a furred jacket, her head in a grey shawl and her feet in heavy top-boots—a costume jarringly out of accord with her pale, delicate, nunnish face. She made quite a new impression on the young prince.