"You know it without."
"I would so love to hear you say it once."
She raised herself on tiptoes and whispered something in his ear.
He held her tighter and tighter to him. "Oh, my happiness, my queen!" he murmured, and his warm lips met hers.
She felt as if wrapped in a sunbeam, in a warm, animating atmosphere, through which none of the critical sneers and opinions of those who stood without the consecrated magic circle of love could penetrate.
* * * * * *
Six weeks later Natalie and Lensky were married, and at the Russian Embassy in Vienna. Her dowry consisted of a very incomplete trousseau, in part lavishly trimmed with lace; of a mortgaged estate in South Russia that had brought in no rents for three years; and of three Cremona violins.
While her elder brother silently concealed the true despair which the marriage caused him behind stiff dignity, the younger, an officer of the guard, with a becoming talent for arrogant impertinences, pleased himself by jesting over this adventurous marriage, and describing the "strange taste" of his sister, with a shrug of the shoulders, as a case of acute monomania. When he spoke of his brother-in-law, he called him nothing but "cette bête sauvage et indécrottable," even when he had long made a practice of borrowing money of him.
Neither of Natalie's brothers or her married sister appeared at her wedding. Only the old princess accompanied her daughter to the altar.