"Oh, what nonsense, Quentin dear! Where should I be safe if not in my own Russia, where I have friends—oh, so many, and tribes and tribes of relations? It is France and England that are unsafe with the German guns grumbling at their doors.... My complaint is that my life is too cosseted and padded. I am too secure, and I do not want to be secure."
The young man lifted a heavy casket from a table at his elbow. It was of dark green imperial jade, with a wonderfully carved lid. He took off the lid and picked up three small oddments of ivory—a priest with a beard, a tiny soldier and a draught-ox. Putting the three in a triangle, he balanced the jade box on them.
"Look, Saskia! If you were living inside that box you would think it very secure. You would note the thickness of the walls and the hardness of the stone, and you would dream away in a peaceful green dusk. But all the time it would be held up by trifles—brittle trifles."
She shook her head. "You do not understand. You cannot understand. We are a very old and strong people with roots deep, deep in the earth."
"Please God you are right," he said. "But, Saskia, you know that if I can ever serve you, you have only to command me. Now I can do no more for you than the mouse for the lion—at the beginning of the story. But the story had an end, you remember, and some day it may be in my power to help you. Promise to send for me."
The girl laughed merrily. "The King of Spain's daughter," she quoted,
"Came to visit me,
And all for the love
Of my little nut-tree."
The other laughed also, as a young man in the uniform of the Preobrajenski Guard approached to claim the girl. "Even a nut-tree may be a shelter in a storm," he said.
"Of course I promise, Quentin," she said. "Au revoir. Soon I will come and take you to supper, and we will talk of nothing but nut-trees."
He watched the two leave the room, her gown glowing like a tongue of fire in the shadowy archway. Then he slowly rose to his feet, for he thought that for a little he would watch the dancing. Something moved beside him, and he turned in time to prevent the jade casket from crashing to the floor. Two of the supports had slipped.