“None.”
She nodded:
“Europe is a senile creature which forgets overnight. Tant mieux.... You know, I shall sing and dance under my sister’s name here. I told you that, didn’t I?”
“Oh! That would be a great mistake——”
“Listen! Nihla Quellen disappeared—married some fat bourgeois, died, perhaps,”—she shrugged,—“anything 51 you wish, my friend. Who cares to listen to what is said about a dancing girl in all this din of war? Who is interested?”
It was scarcely a question, yet her eyes seemed to make it so.
“Who cares?” she repeated impatiently. “Who remembers?”
“I have remembered you,” he said, meeting her intently questioning gaze.
“You? Oh, you are not like those others over there. Your country is not at war. You still have leisure to remember. But they forget. They haven’t time to remember anything—anybody—over there. Don’t you think so?” She turned in her chair unconsciously, and gazed eastward. “—They have forgotten me over there—” And her lips tightened, contracted, bitten into silence.
The strange beauty of the girl left him dumb. He was recalling, now, all that he had ever heard concerning her. The gossip of Europe had informed him that, though Nihla Quellen was passionately and devotedly French in soul and heart, her mother had been one of those unmoral and lovely Georgians, and her father an Alsatian, named Dunois—a French officer who entered the Russian service ultimately, and became a hunting cheetah for the Grand Duke Cyril, until himself hunted into another world by that old bag of bones on the pale and shaky nag. His daughter took the name of Nihla Quellen and what money was left, and made her début in Constantinople.