Maggie sat back, wrapped in her furs. She was meditating over the events of the day, and more particularly over a certain skill, a quickness of touch, a deft handling of stricken men which she had noted far out on the snowy steppe a few hours earlier. Paul was a different man when he had to deal with pain and sickness; he was quicker, brighter, full of confidence in himself. For the great sympathy was his—that love of the neighbor which is thrown like a mantle over the shoulders of some men, making them different from their fellows, securing to them that love of great and small which, perchance, follows some when they are dead to that place where a human testimony may not be all in vain.
At the castle all was in readiness for the prince and princess, their departure from Tver having been telegraphed. On the threshold of the great house, before she had entered the magnificent hall, Etta’s eyes brightened, her fatigue vanished. She played her part before the crowd of bowing servants with that forgetfulness of mere bodily fatigue which is expected of princesses and other great ladies. She swept up the broad staircase, leaning on Paul’s arm, with a carriage, a presence, a dazzling wealth of beauty, which did not fail to impress the onlookers. Whatever Etta may have failed to bring to Paul Howard Alexis as a wife, she made him a matchless princess.
He led her straight through the drawing-room to the suite of rooms which were hers. These consisted of an ante-room, a small drawing-room, and her private apartments beyond.
Paul stopped in the drawing-room, looking round with a simple satisfaction in all that had been done by his orders for Etta’s comfort.
“These,” he said, “are your rooms.”
He was no adept at turning a neat phrase—at reeling off a pretty honeymoon welcome. Perhaps he expected her to express delight, to come to him, possibly, and kiss him, as some women would have done.
She looked round critically.
“Yes,” she said, “they are very nice.”
She crossed the room and drew aside the curtain that covered the double-latticed windows. The room was so warm that there was no rime on the panes. She gave a little shudder, and he went to her side, putting his strong, quiet arm around her.
Below them, stretching away beneath the brilliant moonlight, lay the country that was his inheritance, an estate as large as a large English county. Immediately beneath them, at the foot of the great rock upon which the castle was built, nestled the village of Osterno—straggling, squalid.