He looked at her earnestly: "And to give up my treasure."
She clung to him: "He won't take me away, mon père. We shall all go home to mamma together."
Her friend smiled, but he shook his head, and Laura's heart sank and the tears filled her eyes. She was too young for all this conflict of feeling. L'Estrange felt it with a sudden sense of compunction. He tried to comfort her as he would have comforted any ordinary child under the circumstances: "No doubt it shall be all as my little girl wishes."
But Laura looked up into his face with those mournful, searching eyes, and then turned away from him. In her simplicity she had read the hollowness of his efforts at consolation, and she was hurt that he should tell her anything but the truth. Her friend stooped down to her and took both her hands in his:
"You are a little witch, Laura. What am I to say to you, then?"
"I don't want you to say what I like," she answered in a low, tearful voice; "I want you to say what is really true." And then she began to cry: "I love you, and I love mamma—oh, so much!—and I think I shall love my papa when I see him. Why can't we all be happy together?"
"Why, little wise one?" He settled his hat upon his brows and turned away, leaving her unconsoled. "Ask the stars," he said from the door, and Laura was left alone to think and wonder, for young as she was the shadow that rests evermore on things human was closing her in its dark embrace. The why, the dark mystery of human fate, had already begun in her young soul its restless questioning.
Her friend felt this, and his heart ached for her, but the mischief was wrought—he could do nothing. Action was the only cure for their common sadness, therefore he would delay no longer. Hiring a droshki, he drove through the modern Moscow, while ever before him rose that mighty circlet of walls and battlements, enclosing, its forest of towers, steeples and cupolas, gorgeous as an Eastern tale, fantastic as the dream of a diseased imagination, that city within a city—the Kremlin.
He was gathering together the forces of his mind, and this helped him in his task, for L'Estrange had ever been specially alive to the influence of externals. Beauty of form and coloring had always been able to sway his moods. This mighty monument, by strength formed and endowed, seemed to brace his spirit as he looked out upon it and thrilled to the memories it enshrined. The great impregnable, before whom Napoleon and his legions melted, the strong abode of the Muscovite giants—Ivan the Terrible and his court—the treasure-house of the Czars, the representative of the history of a nation destined to great things,—as he gazed upon it he felt the softness leave his heart. He was trying to be great, and this monument of human greatness helped him. He could not meet his enemy, although his words were to be, in a certain sense, peace, with the tender voice of a child ringing its sweet sadness into his ears, with the languor of sorrow and pain stealing away his strength.
And gradually as he drove through the shadowy streets, by the walled gardens and stone buildings, with the Kremlin rising ever before him in the distance, his mind took a stronger tone. Not as the wrong-doer, but as the representative of the wronged, he would stand before the man he sought, arraigning his enemy for the crime to which, as he well knew, his own conduct had lent a colorable pretext. L'Estrange could scarcely believe that it was anything but a pretext. Margaret's fault, if fault there had been, was so venial, her manner of life after the separation—and L'Estrange was too much given to intrigue himself to be able to understand how Maurice Grey could know nothing whatever of that—had been so pure, so single in its aims, that the harshness of her husband's judgment became great and vindictive in comparison.