"Then there is yet hope?" she asked, piteously.
"That he may be simply wounded--yes."
"For that hope I thank you, Hospodeen: a little time shall tell us all."
"I was attacked and outnumbered; my own life was in the balance, and I knew him not, nor did he know me, until we were at close quarters, in the moment of his fall. To defend oneself is a natural impulse; and it has been truly said, that if a man armed with a red-hot poker were to make a lunge even at the greatest philosopher, he would certainly parry it, though he were jammed between two sacks of gunpowder. Then I have the honour of addressing the Hospoza Valerie?"
"Yes," she replied, with hauteur; "but who are you, that know my name?"
"I am Captain Henry Hardinge, who--"
"The Hospodeen Hardinge" (Hardinovitch she called it), "who so greatly befriended my dear brother in Germany, and who saved his life at Inkermann?"
"The same."
"I cannot receive you with joy; the present terrible tidings cloud all the past. Yet I have promised to protect you," she added, giving me both her hands to kiss, "and protected you shall be--even should my dead brother be borne here to-night!"
So the slender girl with the dark orbs and golden hair, she of whose miniature I had custody for a little time on that memorable and exciting morning in the Heiligengeist Feld at Hamburg, was now a lovely woman in all the budded bloom of past twenty--a fair Russian, with "more peril in her eyes than fifty of their swords!"