Valeria Petrovna was seated on the divan in her beautiful apartment, her hands were so tightly clasped that the knuckles showed white under the taut skin.
“And then?” she insisted, “and then — “
“Madame, I do not know — how should I?” Marie Lou shook her head sadly.
“Ah,” Valeria Petrovna stood up with a quick gesture of annoyance, “’Ow should you? You could ’ave stayed among the trees to watch. Now, ’ow do I know if ’e ees alive or dead?” She began to pace rapidly up and down, the draperies of her négligé swirling round her.
“But yes, Madame,” Marie Lou protested. “I heard no shots. Surely they will be prisoners, and not dead?”
She was miserably unhappy; these last days had been a nightmare to her. Having spent all her life except her remote childhood in a sleepy Siberian town, with its stupid half-peasant population, shut off from the world by miles of forest and almost arctic snows, living a simple, monotonous existence and nearly always alone except when teaching children, she was amazed and terrified by her experiences in the big cities that she had so longed to see. And now this strange, beautiful woman, who scolded her because she had run away from the ’plane as quickly as she could, just as Simon had told her to.
“’Ow long ago was this?” demanded Valeria Petrovna, suddenly.
“Three days, Madame.”
“Three days, child? Where ’ave you been all the time?” Tall and dark and lovely, Valeria Petrovna towered accusingly above the unfortunate Marie Lou. “Why ’ave you not come to me at once?”
Marie Lou did not resent the manner in which the other woman addressed her, although actually there could not have been more than a couple of years difference in their ages. She tried patiently to explain.