"No, sit here," said the Russian, "I wish to talk with Fanny."
He seated himself beside Lilla, and, after watching a horse clear a jump, remarked:
"Do you know I'm living near you?"
He had taken a house in Westchester County, five miles away from hers. He had been looking for quiet, because he was writing a book about his journey in China—"just for the fun of the thing."
"Yesterday," he added indifferently, "I happened to pass your gates. At least I suppose they were. I had a mind to call."
His hands, clasped round his knee, attracted her unwilling notice. They had become sinewy. He appeared like a hard-muscled elder brother of the listless hypochondriac who in the old days had paid feeble court to her: and strangeness enveloped him, not only because of the changes in his body and character, but also because of the hardships and escapes that he had experienced in the Chinese mountains. Yet in this strangeness Lilla found a disturbingly familiar quality, like an echo of something lost, a vague and diminished reapparition of an old ideal.
"Yes," she said softly, "I wish we could be friends again. But the situation at home is so very delicate."
After a long silence, he uttered, so low that she could hardly hear him:
"Are there no other places?"
The band still played Wiener Mad'l.