“I’m afraid this sounds somewhat like boasting,” he continued in a more gentle tone, and dropping his eyes to the floor of the car, “but the turn the conversation has taken obliged me to say what I have done. Suppose we give it another turn and change the subject. We have unintentionally got upon rather uncomfortable ground.”
Serge and Olga were not slow to take the pointed hint, and so the talk drifted into general and more harmless channels.
CHAPTER V.
A VISION FROM THE CLOUDS.
AT Königsberg, which was reached in nine hours after leaving London, that is to say, soon after seven o’clock in the evening, the Eastern express divided: five of the cars went northward to St. Petersburg, carrying those passengers who were going to participate in the Winter Festival, while the other five which made up the train went on to Moscow and the East.
During the twenty minutes’ stop at Berlin, Olga had found an opportunity of having a few words in private with Serge, and had succeeded in persuading him, much against his will, of the necessity of postponing their marriage, and therefore their visit to Moscow, for the execution of a daring and suddenly-conceived plan which she had thought out, but which she had then no time to explain to him.
Serge, though very loath to postpone even for a day or two the consummation of his hopes and the hour which should make Olga irrevocably his, so far as human laws could bind her to him, was so far under the domination of her imperious will that, as soon as he saw that she had determined to have her own way, he yielded with the best grace he could.