"It has been a fever," says madame; "but she is better of that, and now suffers only from weakness."
"In which case we must wait until she awakes. Do you not suggest a better place than this, madame?"
Madame rose at this rebuke.
"I will go in myself," she said; but before she could take a step the door of the adjoining room was opened and Mademoiselle Kyra herself appeared.
Her dress was a long white robe tied with a girdle. Her hair was like her mother's, but more silken in texture, and fell, as the hair of many Russian women does, almost to her feet. I thought her amazingly beautiful—by far the prettiest woman I had yet seen in this damnable country, and, in truth, I envied His Majesty such good fortune. He, however, seemed in no way impressed by the child's looks, but only by her attitude, which was that of one who walked in her sleep and might not be awakened without danger. Stepping back, with his finger on his lips, the Emperor let the girl go slowly from the room to the great antechamber beyond, we following upon tiptoe, as though we spied upon this unlooked-for apparition.
For a moment I thought that Mademoiselle Kyra was about to descend the stairs to the dining room we had left, but she crossed the landing at the stairs head, and, opening a door upon the far side, entered another bedroom, and from that a spacious apartment furnished like a chapel. Here the Emperor followed her, but madame forbade me to go. I had an instantaneous vision of a picture of the Madonna and a lamp burning before it. Then I saw the girl stumble and appear about to fall, but His Majesty caught her in his arms, and madame immediately closed the door upon them.
"You can wait," she said, and, closing the door of the bedroom and drawing a heavy curtain over it, she left me standing sentinel in that black, dark room.
VI
It was an odd situation, I must confess.
The army is well acquainted with more than one such expedition in which His Majesty has figured, and I was not the first officer, by many, who had watched a house wherein he pursued an adventure of this kind.