'She looked around; no way of escape. The driver of the tarantass raised his whip. He, too, would taste the pleasures of cruelty. She threw her arms up, and called upon Jehovah, whom she worshipped. Before the lash could fall, from within the tarantass sprang a young man, and snatched from the driver's hand the whip. To let it fall on her with more force? Not so. To sweep it full across the faces of the foremost in the crowd. He caught the despised Jewess in his arms, and lifted her into his carriage. The crowd—cowards as well as bullies—drew back. He sprang upon the seat beside the driver, seized the reins, turned the horses, and to them, too, used the whip—so well, that he carried away from that Russian town the saved life of a woman. He took her to a place of safety, and when she was strong enough sent her to join her son in Vienna. She was my mother. She owed her salvation from a death shameful and agonising to—'
He stopped short suddenly and glanced expressively at the broad-shouldered figure at the other end of the room. Then he said,—
'Such is my friend. Your Count Litvinoff—would he so have acted?'
He looked at Vernon, but Clare answered quickly,—
'Indeed he would. Only a little while ago he risked his life, not to save life, but to save working men from injuring their own cause, by wild violence.'
Hirsch looked at her with mingled interest and disfavour.
'Possibly,' he said; 'it may be I misjudge him, but for me he is too brilliant.'
Cora looked at her friend, and smiled a smile which Clare interpreted easily enough as a reference to their conversation of that afternoon, and out of pure defiance she would probably have said something still more strong in Count Litvinoff's favour if the door had not opened at that moment to admit two very dear, very sweet, and completely unexpected friends of Mrs Quaid's. The advent of these two, who were dwellers in Gath, and brought in with them a breath of pure Philistine air, led to the rising and re-arrangement of seats, of which the children's game of 'General Post' is a sort of caricature.
Mrs Quaid being now completely occupied with the new arrivals, Petrovitch seized the golden opportunity, and when the room settled down again into repose, Clare found that he occupied the ottoman beside her, where Hirsch had been sitting before. Miss Quaid and young Vernon had gravitated towards the conservatory, for Cora was a great lover of flowers, and Eustace, while he liked the flowers well enough, liked her still better. Hirsch had been set going by one of Mr Quaid's broad-based questions, and Miss Stanley and Petrovitch were virtually alone. And yet, though each had wished often enough to see the other again, now that they were side by side it seemed to be not so easy to talk. It is always so difficult to chatter about trifles when one is anxious to talk seriously, and it is difficult, almost up to the point of impossibility, to plunge into reasonable conversation in a room full of inconsequent prattle. Added to this, Petrovitch felt an unaccustomed and unaccountable shyness, and to Clare it was somehow less easy to ask his advice than she had thought it would have been, and than it had been to ask Count Litvinoff's.
She was the first to speak.