“I do not know what I meant,” she said; “I do not know. You must not ask me. It slipped out when I was not thinking. Oh! please be generous, and do not ask me.”
By some instinct she had leaped to the right mark. She had asked a Bukaty to be generous.
“Some day,” he said, “I will ask you.”
And he walked with her to the gate of the gardens in silence.
XXVII
A SACRIFICE
Though the fine weather did not last, it was a promise of better things, like the letter that precedes a welcome friend. After it the air seemed warmer, though snow fell again, and the thermometer went below zero.
Wanda and her father did not return to Warsaw as they had intended.
So long as the frost holds, the country is endurable; nay, it is better than the towns on those great plains of eastern Europe; but when the thaw comes, and each small depression is a puddle, every low-lying field a pond, and whole plains become lakes, few remain in the villages who can set their feet upon the pavement. The early spring, so closely associated in most minds with the song of birds and the budding of green things, is in Poland and Russia a period of waiting for the water to drain off the flat land; a time to look to one's thickest top-boots in these countries, where men and women are booted to the knee, and every third house displays the shoemaker's sign upon its door-post.