"How odd, my dear old fellow, that we should all think you drowned, and might have been wearing crape on our sleeves, but for the lack thereof in camp, and the fact that mourning has gone out of fashion since death is so common among us; while all the time you have been mewed up (by the Cossacks in the Baidar Valley) within some forty miles of us; and so stupidly, too!" said Caradoc, as we sat late in the night over our grog and tobacco in his hut.
"Not so stupidly, after all," I replied, while freely assisting myself to his cavendish.
"How?"
"There was such a girl there, Phil!" I added, with a sigh.
"Oho! where?"
"At Yalta."
"Woronzow's palace, or château?"
"Yes; but why wink so knowingly?"
"So, after all, you found there was balm in Gilead?" said he, laughing. "You must admit then, if she impressed you so much, that all your bitter regrets about a certain newspaper paragraph were a little overdone, and that I was a wise prophet? And what was this girl--Russian, Tartar, Greek, a Karaite Jewess, or what?"
"A pure Russian."