“Then, in that case,” she smiled, “I can leave you safely with him. You will pardon my retiring, but I have not closed my eyes since the masquerade.”
Upon her withdrawal Beauvais proposed a cigar, and the pair sallied forth from a portcullised archway.
“I did not expect to see a feudal-looking castle in this part of Europe,” remarked Wilfrid.
“An architectural whim of the first Catharine,” returned Beauvais. “Built in imitation of one in Livonia, that she had often admired when a peasant girl.”
Before them in that faint, lovely twilight, which is the only night St. Petersburg has in the month of July, lay a smooth, verdant lawn, fringed by a dark pine-wood, whose vistas terminated in a distant shimmer of blue water.
“If you are hesitating which way to go,” observed Wilfrid, “let us turn to the Silver Strand.”
“Ah! Good! The view from that point is particularly fine.”
It was not the view that Wilfrid was thinking of, but the remark overheard at the masquerade that the lady’s fan that had dropped into the river would be carried by the current to this strand; and an unaccountable impulse came upon him to verify the statement.
Smoking and conversing, the two men strolled leisurely onward through a woodland path that finally opened upon a beach of glistening grey sand.
The view from it, as the doctor had said, was very fine, so fine that Wilfrid forgot all about the fan.