“You ride like my countrywomen, madame,” I said, “and you speak French well.”
She could not hear “madame” from my lips without changing countenance, and she blushed divinely now.
“My mother was a Pole, monsieur,” she replied simply, “and hers a Frenchwoman; I am not all Russian.”
“Ah,” I said softly; “I thought there was a tie of sympathy between us. After all—you are a little French.”
She cast a shy look at me, from under her long lashes, and would not answer me. A conversation in one voice goes but lamely, as I found, yet something in her manner elated me. A long pause ensued, and I fell to wondering in what light she regarded me—as her husband or her groom?
Of one thing, however, I felt certain; she no longer feared me; indeed, I thought she began to trust me; but as Maître le Bastien quoted the proverb, “Souvent femme varie,” and I was to find it so.
There were few trees in the landscape, but some twenty or thirty paces ahead of us, in an elbow of the road, was a clump of sycamores, and behind the land dropped into a hollow, where water lay in a reedy pool and some cattle stood there, knee-deep, drinking. Away off, beyond the plain, the river of light was a molten sea of gold, where the sun was rising before us, for we rode northeast from Moscow.
“Madame, do you know of what this scene reminds me?” I asked her quietly.
We had been so long silent that she started at the sound of my voice—flushing as she always did.
“Nay, monsieur, I know not,” she replied.