"You can't help going to Warsaw," said the Princess. "You can arrange that whoever gets there first waits for the rest of the party.
"I wonder what the chances of getting from Warsaw to Petrograd or even Kiev are?" Ian asked her. This had been worrying him a good deal. He did not want to be left in Warsaw, unable to realize his valuables.
The Princess blinked her narrow eyes at him and tapped her stick on the floor. It was the same ebony stick whose knob was an enormous emerald set in pearls which she used in peace days. It was her one vanity. But in order to preserve the stones from scratches and dirt she had a lot of little washleather caps made for the knob which were changed and washed as soon as they showed the need for it. For many months now this wonderful old woman, remnant of a type which the revolution has probably swept away forever, whose friends of youth had passed away, who stood alone in her memories, had been living between her hospital-train and her Petrograd palace, turned into a hospital, too. With that independence characteristic of her House she refused to have anything to do with the Russian Red Cross, supplied her own train, nurses, surgeons and requisities, her own engine-drivers, her own locomotives, and wood from her own forests to heat the train and make it go. The food came from her own estates, the civilian aid from her own circle of friends and acquaintances. In fact, she supplied everything but the patients and they never lacked, for Vera Petrovna's train and hospital soon won for themselves renown for comfort and good nursing that the wounded clamored to be taken there. Ian watched her as she stood, near his mother's chair, evidently revolving some plan in her shrewd old head. He, too, had heard of her, of her wealth and imperiousness, her kind heart and open hand. He reflected, little bitterly, that her fortune was safe, because her immense forests in Central Asia and her hunting grounds in Siberia, wherein you could have put Ruvno and lost it, where trappers caught sables and marten for the world's women, lay well beyond the invaders' grasp. He could not foresee her terrible end, which she met with fortitude; little guessed that her palace in Petrograd would be broken into by Lenine's mob, looted and burnt; that her old body would be thrown into the nearest canal after the life had been strangled out of it. All he saw now was a very energetic and prosperous member of the Russian aristocracy, a woman who could afford to laugh at the German advance because her native land was intact.
"Count," she said, addressing him because she had all her life preferred to deal with men.... "I have a proposal."
"Yes?"
"Will you allow me to take these ladies in my train to Petrograd? We go straight through."
"Straight through? But the difference in the gauge of the rails?"
She gave him a wink.
"That's a Russian bureaucratic legend," she returned. "I have a contrivance they put on the wheels, and all gauges are alike. The Germans have it, too, you may be sure, all ready to run their trains right up to Vilna. But to business. It's far better for you, Countess, and you, young ladies, to come straight up to safety with me than to risk being left in Warsaw. Who knows if you will get seats in a train or motor-car now?"
"It's very kind of you," said Ian, glancing at his mother, "But----"