“PIOTR”

MOONGLADE

A NOVEL

BY THE AUTHOR OF
The Martyrdom of an Empress

OFFICIER DE L’ORDRE DE L’INSTRUCTION
PUBLIQUE DE FRANCE

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXV

Books by The Author of
“THE MARTYRDOM OF AN EMPRESS”

• MOONGLADE. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
• A DOFFED CORONET. Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
• THE CRADLE OF THE ROSE. Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
• EMERALD AND ERMINE. Crown 8vo.
• GRAY MIST. Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
• THE KEYSTONE OF EMPIRE. Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
• SNOW-FIRE. Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
• THE TRIBULATIONS OF A PRINCESS. Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
• THE TRIDENT AND THE NET. Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
• THE MARTYRDOM OF AN EMPRESS. Illustrated. Crown 8vo.

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1915
C-P

TO
A
WITH
EVERLASTING THOUGHTS

MOONGLADE

Moonglade upon the waters whitely lying;
Though the wind, shouting from the western verge,
Herdeth the huddled cloud-rack, flying—flying—
Glory still re-emergent, rift-descrying,
Spanneth the somber surge.
Moonglade, O Moonglade, heavenly calm and still,
Throned on the tossing manes unbroke to thill,
I know, beholding thee,
The storm will pass, and night upon the sea!

Moonglade the dark lanes of the forest keeping,
Soundless and silent, hearken as ye list;
Lakes of bejewelled vapor lowly sleeping,
And the long grasses from the surface peeping
Levelled of silver mist.
Moonglade, O Moonglade, that your Fates fulfil,
In your black forest-prison sweetly still,
I know, beholding thee,
Lights of the lost world, Faith and Purity!

Moonglade, empearled of flame unearthly, lying
Over the crystal plains of snow and light,
While the lost wind, of naked cold a-crying,
Shudders beneath the half-shut stars espying
Down from the steely night.
Moonglade, O Moonglade, heavenly calm and still,
Moulding to beauty bitterness and ill,
I know, beholding thee,
Yet is there strength, and truth and constancy!

Moonglade, a pale and forthright splendor, deeping
The mountain shadows on the river-flow,
Across the sullen flood’s resistless creeping—
Across the years, the wreckage and the weeping,
You stand, so let them go!
Moonglade, O Moonglade, that my heart doth fill,
Causeway to Avalon unchanging still,
I know that pass by thee,
The “bowery hollows, crowned with summer sea”!

1914.

M. M.

MOONGLADE

CHAPTER I

The Sphinx, prophetically sung
By Fable old, and ever young,
Is Beauty perilous, that stands
With eagle wings and taloned hands.

“Mademoiselle Seton is requested to come down to the parlor.”

The white-coiffed nun stood inside the door, waiting for the tall girl who at the words had briskly risen from the first rank of her fellow-pupils. She was older than any there, and her whole allure as she stepped forward betrayed a certain sense of superiority and conscious pride. Silently she followed Madame Marie-Immaculée along the stone-paved and arched passage leading to the broad, shallow stairs, her step as light and noiseless as thistle-down, rhythmed, as it were, to the musical tinkle of her leader’s great rosary. In the vaulted hall below she made a deep obeisance, and passed into the parloir, leaving the nun on the threshold, as is the rule.

The parloir of the Sacred Heart Convent at Bryn is a cheerful place, and was full of sun-rays that morning. Plants carefully tended showed their green leaves and bright blossoms on the window-sills behind the snowy sheerness of tightly drawn curtains, the old oaken furniture shone with numberless polishings, and a great silver-and-ivory crucifix fastened to the pale-gray wall gleamed benignantly above a jardinière filled with freshly gathered “votive” heathers. Blinking a little in all this brightness after the dimness of the corridor, the girl hesitated a second.

“Good morning, Laurence. Don’t you see me?” The voice was prim, exceedingly correct in enunciation, and high-bred in accent.

“Oh, is that you, Aunt Elizabeth?” the girl said, coming quietly forward, a cool hand outstretched. “When did you land?”

“Two hours ago, at Tréport. And I am here to take you back with me this evening.”

This was delivered much in the manner of a pronunciamiento, and the recipient thereof raised her eyebrows nervously.

“This evening!” she echoed. “Why so much haste, Aunt Elizabeth, pray?”

“Because you have been here four years, which is much longer than we wished you to remain,” the elder lady stated, tartly. “You are eighteen, and, being English, it is high time that you should become reaccustomed to British ways and manners.”

A quaint little smile drew up the corners of Laurence’s lips, but her eyes remained serious. She was a singularly beautiful girl, graceful of figure, dainty-featured, and gifted with an alabaster complexion and a wealth of chestnut hair that would have made even a plain woman attractive.

“You find me too Frenchified?” she queried, twisting the azure ribbon of her silver medal around her fingers—for she was an “Enfant de Marie,” and one of the model pupils of her convent-school.

“Ye-es,” hesitated Lady Seton, raising her lorgnette the better to study this “uncomfortable” niece. “Ye-e-s! I am afraid so, but we will soon alter all that!” And she let the lorgnette drop to the very end of its interminable amethyst-and-pearl chain. “You had better get your things ready as quickly as you can, Laurence,” she continued, “for neither your uncle nor the tide is wont to wait, and I shall come back for you at six o’clock sharp.”

“You crossed on the Phyllis, then?”

“Why, of course! What else would have landed us at Tréport?”

“I don’t know,” the girl indifferently replied.

Lady Seton shrugged one shoulder, not in the acceptedly Gallic way, which she would have condemned, but in a slightly contemptuous fashion.

“Be ready, bag and baggage, at a quarter to six, please, without fail. I’ll be glad to see you out of that ghastly black uniform—or whatever you call it! It is decidedly dowdy!”

Laurence laughed, smoothed the straight alpaca folds falling from shoulder to ankle, and glanced at her aunt quizzically.

“I am going to interview the Mother Superior,” pronounced the latter again, “and then I shall go, so that you may have an opportunity to take all the hysterical farewells you choose from your beloved friends here.”

Hysterical! Laurence laughed once more her low, mocking laugh, and effaced herself before the rangey form of her aunt as her British ladyship set off, under full sail, sweeping past Madame Marie-Immaculée—still pacing monotonously up and down the hall, out of hearing, but in full sight of the parloir door.

“Poor Mother Superior!” Laurence mused, with piously raised eyes. “Poor Mother Superior! I hope my delightful aunt will have nothing but edifying things to say of me; she is not overburdened with tact, as a rule!”

As she reascended the stairs she was suddenly met by a whirlwind of outstretched arms, flying golden hair, and skirts of alpaca like her own, which flung itself headlong upon her.

“Laurence! Laurence! Have they come for you already?... Oh! Oh, Laurence!” The breathless sentence ended abruptly in a burst of whole-hearted sobs as Marguerite de Plenhöel clung desperately about her comrade’s neck.

“Voyons, mon petit,” consoled Laurence, keeping her equilibrium with wonderful ease under the circumstances. “Sois raisonnable!”

But the fifteen-year-old evidently was disinclined to listen to reason, at least just then, for she went on choking and gasping, and entreating betweentimes: “Don’t go away, Loris. Don’t leave me! Don’t!”

“Hush! Hush, little one! Hush! Let’s slip into the garden. They’ll hear you if we stay here!”

“We—ca—n’t—can’t go in—into ... the garden—with—out—permis—sion,” Marguerite convulsively objected.

But Laurence was firm. “But, yes, we can. There’s nobody about now. Come quick!” she commanded, half dragging, half carrying Marguerite down-stairs again. And thus at last they reached a small postern opening from the north wing, and stopped only when, still clasping each other, they stepped into the wonderful allée of lindens that skirts the cloisters on that side of the building.

The sun filtering through the pale leafage made swaying spots of pink copper all over the decorously raked gravel; the heliotropes and old-fashioned verbenas and rose-geraniums filling the borders smelled sweet to heaven, and in a near-by bosquet of laburnum a green finch sang to burst his little throat (à se rompre la gorge).

Marguerite—“Gamin” to her intimates—instantly became quieter. With a gesture that was very youthful and very impatient she pushed the tumbled gold out of her big blue eyes, still brimful of tears, and stamped her narrow foot.

“Don’t tell me it’s true!” she cried. “Don’t, Loris! It would be too terrible!”

Miss Seton—the Hon. Laurence Seton—in all the plenitude of her admirably controlled faculties, stared at the delightful tomboy beside her.

“It is true, my poor ‘Gamin,’” she serenely stated, checking another outburst with a slight recoil of her supple body. “My excellent uncle and aunt have resolved that I shall go with them to ‘la triste Angleterre,’ and so to the sad England I must go. Voilà!”

“But when—when?” demanded the quivering little creature. “When?”

Laurence hesitated. To tell the “Gamin” that only a few hours remained before her final departure from Bryn would destroy all her chances of making her preparations in peace; for this, alas! was a half-holiday, and Marguerite would be free to follow her about everywhere. To tell a frank fib was out of the question, of course. Laurence always avoided direct lies, so she took refuge in a simple evasion.

“How can I tell exactly? Such queer people as my relatives are apt to be unreliable,” she equivocated. “You don’t know my uncle Bob and my aunt Elizabeth, luckily for you, ‘Gamin.’ One can never guess what is going to happen next when they come on the scene!”

“They must be atrocious—abominable!” snapped poor Marguerite, her dark eyebrows meeting in a furious frown above her exquisitely arched little nose.

“N-no, not that; merely very tiresome and authoritative—insular to a terrible extent! He, as I have often told you, is a yachtsman above, before, after, and during everything else; by no means unkind, but as stubborn as a whole troop of mules. She—well, she’s Elizabethan; not kindly nor good-looking, but worse! Brick-red morally and physically, without any luster or brilliancy, fond of absolute power, narrow-minded, and—oh, well, quite unendurable.”

“O-o-o-o-h!” gasped Marguerite. “Oh ... o ... o ... o ... h!”

“I am their ward,” Laurence continued. “They are my omnipotent guardians, and I can never hope to get rid of them, for I am a beggar, living on their rather acid bounty. Do you understand, petit ‘Gamin’?”

No, petit “Gamin” did not understand. There was something askew in that speech, somehow, something that grated upon her, though just what it was she could not have told. She therefore remained silent, her eyes fixed upon two yellow butterflies chasing each other round and round a clump of blue hortensias artistically grouped at the corner of the cloister beneath the leaden rain-spout, whose frequent libations kept those gorgeous globes of bloom from reverting to their original creamy pink.

“A beggar!” the child said at last. “A beggar!... Then why don’t you come and live with me at Plenhöel instead of with them in England?” There was extraordinary contempt in the way she said “them.” “I have only another year to stay here,” she passionately pleaded, “and every single thing I own will be half yours, Loris darling—every single thing!”

Eyes and hands uplifted, she gazed imploringly at Laurence, and for an instant a softer expression flitted across the latter’s somewhat sulky face.

“They would not let me do that—at any rate, not until I come of age,” she asserted. “No, decidedly not.... And, what’s more, I would not accept charity from your people, who are no relations of mine.”

Marguerite looked at her friend in positive amazement. “Charity!” she indignantly remonstrated; and then violently she cast herself prone upon the green border of the allée, kicking her tiny toes into the turf. “Charity indeed!” she angrily cried from within the shelter of her intertwined arms. “Charity—to you!”

“Mademoiselle de Plenhöel!” a voice expostulated behind her; and Mademoiselle de Plenhöel regained her feet with amazing promptness, crimson with confusion, to face the most dreaded of her educators, Madame Marie-Antoinette, whose rigid manners and severe cast of countenance were the iron mask of a heart unsuspectedly tender.

“What does this behavior mean?” she now demanded, standing like a black statue of reproof within a yard of the culprit, her white hands folded within her wide sleeves.

“Pardon me, Madame Marie-Antoinette,” Marguerite stammered, “but you ... you see, Laurence is g-going away ... soon!” Here tears of mingled rage and distress began again to run from beneath the heavy, drooping lashes!

An almost imperceptible wave of delicate color rose to the nun’s still features and wiped twenty years from them! She, too, had known those great despairs of early youth—far greater ones, perhaps—and it was in an altogether altered voice that she replied.

“I am sorry to see you so unhappy, Marguerite,” she said, drawing nearer to her, “but such outbursts of feeling are not seemly, my child; besides, they prove nothing—nothing at all—and are—er—vulgar!” She gave a little cough, and went on, equably: “Laurence has her duties as you have yours. So come with me now, at least until you have controlled yourself”; and as an afterthought she concluded, “By the way, you are both in contravention, for you are well aware that the garden and park are forbidden ground to you when unaccompanied by one of us.”

Marguerite reverently touched a fold of the nun’s robe. “I am sorry,” she whispered very mournfully; “I am sorry!”

For a moment Laurence had been watching the picture made by the “Gamin” in this unusually contrite mood, looking, in fact, quite like a little saint in the discreet sun-shower beneath the trees that dappled her slim black gown and formed a bright nimbus around her lovely lowered head. Twice she opened her lips to speak, but refrained. Then, courtesying deeply to the nun, she walked demurely indoors, where, however, as soon as she found herself alone, she raced at top speed up the stairs, thinking, as she went: “Better so. Outbursts are—are—vulgar, as Madame Marie-Antoinette has so sapiently remarked, and our poor ‘Gamin’ is still so very impulsive—so impossible to convince that I’d sooner not try it!”

CHAPTER II

Where first the wave, in long unrest
Rolled from the glamour of the West,
Breaks with the voice of Fate along
The shores of Legend and of Song.

The sea was beating into unbroken foam at the foot of the towering cliff—an uninterrupted front of granite, quite unscalable except at narrow clefts four and five miles apart, which nobody would attempt except at low water, when a precarious path of shingle is laid bare between that grim rampart and the lip of the tide. A summer storm had raged for two days and nights along this terrible coast, and now, although the leadenness of the sky was thinning here and there to patches of faded turquoise, the waves, still savagely churned by the wind, were piling beds of semi-solid spume far above the ragged margin of the inner Bay of Plenhöel.

From the stone terrace of the Castle the sight would have been awe-inspiring to any but its inhabitants, hardened through generation after generation to such spectacles and such sensations. To the right of the fortress-like building a wall of spindrift whirling up an embayment of the falaise shut off all view of the coast to the eastward; to the left and in front chaos reigned supreme in a fathomless gulf, while behind it miles of pine forest stretched to the crest of the table-land in endless tossing manes of somber green.

Five hundred feet of sheer cliff about which thousands of gulls flew screaming in and out of the roaring gusts of the gale, and down-shore the intermittent boom of a souffleur overtoning by many cavernous notes the great voices of sky and sea.

The library at Plenhöel is one of the most pleasing places imaginable. Long ago it had been a guard-room, where the officers of the garrison watched the offing from the tunnel-like window-embrasures, and the pikes of halberdiers resounded upon the granite-flagged floor. Some time after the Chouan wars it was transformed into an eminently “living” apartment, paneled in carved oak, book-lined on three sides, and pierced by many tall French windows that open upon a broad balcony of wonderfully wrought stone.

In one of the aforesaid embrasures that tempestuous morning the still, gracile silhouette of Marguerite de Plenhöel was outlined against the background of sea and cloud. She had grown a little since a year, but it seemed evident that she would never be either a tall or an “imposing” woman. But what could one not forgive in so lovely a little creature who, with her square shoulders and slim, round waist, looked wholesome and strong as any sand-poppy; whose delicately oval face was so full of happy life, from the deep-set blue eyes to the tender mouth, the patrician arch of the nose, and the obstinate little chin dented by a tantalizing fossette? The crinkly silkiness of her hair—that crowning beauty of hers—now piled upon her head in rebellious masses, shone even in the fog-dimmed light as she bent forward to gaze fervently through the panes, breathing on and rubbing them again and again to free them from their misted opaqueness.

She had been home for good a couple of weeks only, and greeted the convulsions of nature as a treat especially prepared for her; for now and then she clapped her hands and sketched a merry jig-step or two on the polished floor, evidently in applause of so stirring a scene. So absorbed, indeed, was she in her contemplation, her lovely face flattened now against the glass, that she did not hear a door unclose and shut behind her. She was counting aloud for the seventh fateful wave that all true-born ocean folk hold in so profound a respect.

“One, two, three, four, five, six ...” she called, as if summoning the crowning surge in unconquerable impatience.

“Seven!” said a voice immediately at her side, and she whirled about on one toe to find herself confronted by a very tall man who was smiling amusedly.

“Basil!” she exclaimed. “Cousin Basil! Where did you jump from?”

“From the cliff path, which I don’t recommend as a peaceful choice of promenade just now,” he replied, calmly; but his fine gray eyes, nevertheless, held a suggestion of the pleasing battle he had just fought against the tempest.

“Why didn’t you call me?” she reproached, with an adorable pout. “I would have liked so much to come with you.”

“Little girls, my cousin,” he answered, gravely, “should not be risked on the edge of draughty precipices.”

The “Gamin” frowned. She was too young as yet to enjoy being called a little girl, and the riposte came at once.

“Where old gentlemen are safe, younger people may surely go!” she said, mischievously.

“Old gentleman ... hummm ... m! That’s rather hard on me, isn’t it, dear cousin mine?”

“Hard, why?” she retorted. “How old are you, anyhow?” And, standing on the very points of her tiny slippers, she pointed at his temples with two accusing fingers.

“One, two, three, four, five, six ... silver threads among the bronze,” she misquoted.

“And seven!” he coolly admitted, looking smilingly down at her. “Seven or more, what matters? I am thirty-four, you know, my little cousin.”

“What matters indeed! You have enough privileges already, without expecting to remain always young.”

“Privileges! You surprise me!”

“Certainly,” she insisted. “Aren’t you a great Prince, a Serene-Highness—just as in the fairy-tales? Haven’t you huge, big estates in Russia and the Crimea, villas in the south of France, fortins in the Caucasus, mines in Siberia, besides loads and loads of money, jewels, picture-galleries, a private band of musicians, acres of hothouses, horses, stud-farms? A regular Marquis de Carabas, that’s what you are!”

She paused for lack of breath, and once more he laughed.

“You overwhelm me, ma cousine,” he mocked; “but since I am old, quite an old gentleman, you see ... what are these manifold gifts to me?”

“Old! Oh, not so very old, after all!” she suddenly contradicted. “Fortunately you are handsome, and very, very tall. Whew ... ew! You are tall! I love that! I despise small men. They’re always barking and fussing, like black-and-tans. Don’t you think so?”

“Your knowledge is indeed extensive, ‘Gamin,’” he praised. “Yet it is scarcely necessary to be a giant in order to possess a kindly temper. I have met—”

“Never mind what you have met,” she interrupted. “I know that you are good-tempered, and six foot four inches. That’s enough proof of what I said just now.”

“Thank you!” he began, dryly. But in one clean bound she cleared the space between the window and a ponderous oaken bench, upon which she perched herself, her feet ten inches from the immense rug covering all the middle of the room. “And now,” she stated, “I must be reasonable, and grown-up, and all the rest of it, so that the person who first exhorted me to listen to reason may not find me lacking in that desirable quality.”

“Is there really a person bold enough to preach reason to you?” he commenced; but she silenced him by an eminently peremptory gesture.

“Listen!” she admonished. “Do you hear wheels?”

“Wheels?” he questioned, sincerely astonished. “In this storm?”

“And why not? Why shouldn’t people travel in a storm when they are not imprisoned, as I am?”

“You are a prisoner?” Prince Basil asked, with amazement.

“Of course I am. Papa—the dear Saints of Brittany bless him—has decreed—decreed, you understand—‘J’ai décrété’ was what he said—he loves such sentences—that he would go alone to fetch my Loris at the station. You will agree with him, I am sure, ‘little girls’ should always be left at home. Eh?”

“What is ‘your Loris,’ if I may be so indiscreet as to ask, petite cousine?”

“What? You mean who, I suppose. She is the most beautiful girl in the world—an English ‘professional beauty,’ they say. She was at the Sacré-Cœur with me, and she loved me—yes, she loved me, though she played me a mean trick once; but it wasn’t her fault, poor dear! I’ve never seen her since. And just imagine, her ogres of uncle and aunt have condescended to let her spend a month with us here—a whole month—thirty days—no, thirty-one, as this is the last day of June.”

“This promises to be interesting,” Basil remarked. “A gloriously beautiful maiden oppressed by avuncular ogres, and coming all the way from perfidious Albion to charm the natives of ancient Armorica! It sounds very well, when one comes to think of it!”

The “Gamin,” who had pulled from the pocket of her white serge frock a handful of hazelnuts, and was joyously cracking them one after another between her short white teeth, laughed and nearly choked herself.

“You have,” she asserted, as soon as she could speak, “a funny way of expressing yourself, Cousin Basil. Why don’t you add that a handsome Prince Charming came from much farther off yet, to do likewise?”

“Again? Vous y tenez décidément, ma cousine! Handsome is as handsome does, you know, and as yet I am not conscious of having behaved in any very remarkable way since my arrival!”

Marguerite raised her shoulders to the level of her ears, threw a handful of nut-shells in the bronze waste-paper holder at her side, and jumped from her lofty seat.

“It must be nearly eleven,” she cried in sudden alarm. “We’ll miss it all if we don’t go down-stairs now, at once. Come quick.”

“Miss what?” the impassive Prince demanded, slowly rising from the deep arm-chair where he had established himself.

But she had already glissaded to the head of the stairs, and it took all he could accomplish with his long legs to overtake her before she had quite succeeded in breaking her pretty nails, in endeavoring to open one of the tall windows giving on the north terrace.

“Leave that to me. The wind is straight against it. Wait, won’t you, please?” he pleaded, his hand over both of hers, for she was still struggling manfully with the complicated fastening.

“I’m very strong,” she panted. “I’ve done it lots of times.”

Evidently she was very strong, for the window suddenly gave way and, had it not been for Basil’s weight, would have knocked her flat. But little did she care for such slight contretemps. With a ringing war-whoop she raced out, her hair—instantly blown from its restraining combs by the whistling blast—streaming in clouds behind her, her skirts flying back from her slim ankles, and danced wildly toward the carven parapet.

Basil, hastily securing the window from the outside, ran after her, afraid that she would really be whirled by the back-draught over the balustrade to the causeway below. He was laughing helplessly at the extraordinary antics of this queer little being who bewitched him, but when he caught up with her he took firm hold upon her arm.

“You imp!” he shouted, for the hurly-burly was such that he could not hear his own voice, nor her reply, for that matter; but it was not a very decorous one, to judge by the roguish sparkle of her eyes. However, she did not shake off his hand, which quite surprised him, and soon they were leaning side by side against a beautiful mediæval gargoyle hewn from the stone wall of the terrace, and at that moment disgorging the downpour of the morning hours.

Following her excited glance, he saw, away down at the foot of the causeway, a four-in-hand, fiercely beaten by the wind as it labored up the steep incline.

“Les voilà! Les voilà!” Marguerite shrieked, quite beside herself with delight. “They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

The words were flung in Basil’s teeth by the tempest. But he had already recognized—his sight being unusually keen—his cousin de Plenhöel handling the ribbons, and seen that a slender feminine form, tightly cloaked and hooded, was sitting beside him. Far behind the equipage a fourgon was following, with the maid and luggage.

“Oh, look at the horses’ manes!” shrieked Marguerite, pointing to the drag, now almost immediately beneath. “They are blown all sideways. Oh dear! How funny!”

“And what about yours?” Basil laughed, vainly attempting to capture in both hands the flying silk of her glorious hair; but with another of her acrobatic bounds she darted from his side, turned the corner like a blown feather, and disappeared into the Cour-d’Honneur, where he hastened to join her, bullied by the wind and with less decorum than was his wont.

Great black clouds were once more piling up in the sky, and as the horses turned into the wide paved space a few enormous drops of rain began to fall.

Fortunately here there was some shelter from the storm, and it became possible to reassume some dignity of demeanor, if one felt so inclined. Marguerite, however, had no such cares, and as soon as her father—Le Beau Plenhöel, known since his early youth by the eminently unpretentious sobriquet of “Antinoüs”—had accomplished a masterly turn around the central fountain and brought his mettlesome team to a stand at the foot of the perron, she had clambered on the near wheel and, lifting herself to the box, was hugging Laurence Seton like a bear.

The Marquis de Plenhöel burst into hearty laughter and glanced indulgently at Basil, standing ready to help the two girls down. The grooms had jumped to the horses’ heads, where they now remained, like twin wax figures incapable of movement or expression, under the pelting shower.

“Mais, mon ‘Gamin,’ let her get down!” Plenhöel called. “We’ll all be drenched to the bone.” And then only Marguerite regretfully leaped into his arms, making it possible for Basil to assist Laurence to the ground. Under such circumstances the introduction was necessarily quite unconventional, and, driven indoors by the rain now flooding in torrents from the leaden gutters overhead and ricochetting in the liveliest fashion from the steps, Marguerite and Laurence ran off without further ado.

Pulling off his long mackintosh and soaked driving-gloves, Plenhöel turned to his cousin:

“A dramatic entrée!” he said, grinning, and displaying under his blond mustache teeth of a whiteness and regularity worthy of a boy of twenty. “With the ‘Gamin’ one can always expect something unforeseen,” he added, leading the way to his den. “Here, have a dash of cognac, Basil. You look almost as pumped as I am!” And he pushed the tantalus toward his relative. “It will sharpen our appetites for luncheon, too.”

Basil quietly possessed himself of a very easy chair, and, declining the spirits by a gesture, lighted a cigarette.

“Who and what is that ethereal apparition who is throwing our ‘Gamin’ into such convulsions of joy?” he asked, lazily following with his eyes a ring of smoke floating toward the caissoned ceiling.

“Hum-um!” “Antinoüs” replied, setting down his little glass and drying his mustache on his handkerchief. “A very beautiful person, as you may have seen.”

“I did not see. She was cowled like a monk, and, save for a bit of resolute chin and the gleam of an interesting pair of eyes—”

“Oh, she’s beautiful; no doubt about that, my boy; but as far as I have been able to judge—which is not much, I admit—she is scarcely the sort I would have accused the ‘Gamin’ of turning into an idol.”

“Accuse is severe!” Basil remarked, knocking the ashes from his cigarette with the tip of his little finger. “What’s amiss with her? You don’t mean that she’s a dark filly?”

“No....” “Antinoüs” hesitated. “No—but hard in the mouth, and a bit sultry in temperament, I should say. Of course it is hard to judge, where the Anglo-Saxon ‘Miss Independence’ is concerned; but this one has been admirably brought up by our good ladies of the Sacré-Cœur; and moreover I understand that all her life she has been pruned, and prismed, and molded, and clipped by a dragon of an aunt—an ex-beauty—now rather long in the tooth, who, it appears, is not often inclined to joke. But still the finished product of her labors inspires me with no extravagant amount of confidence.”

Basil gazed thoughtfully at his kinsman. He knew him to be a connoisseur, and a fastidious one, at that, for all the women of his family were, or had been, renowned for their loveliness. Moreover, married at twenty-two to one of Brittany’s fairest daughters, he had been left a widower fourteen months later, when Marguerite was born. Be it said to his praise, he had never dreamt of giving his dear “Gamin” a stepmother; but when all was said and done he was now barely thirty-eight, extraordinarily good-looking, and eminently disinclined by nature to keep his eyes closed when beauty was about.

“Not bridle wise?” Basil smiled up at Antinoüs. “According to your lights, at least?”

“Bridle wise! Who d’you take me for?” the Marquis protested. “You don’t fancy I’d try to flirt”—he said “fleureter”—“with a damsel under my protection, do you? Besides,” he added, naïvely, “she’s not my style ... not a bit of it!”

“Heaven be thanked, then,” Basil gravely replied. “We can henceforth rest in peace!”

Plenhöel burst out laughing and clapped his cousin on the back. “There’s the bell. Let’s to table, unbeliever!” And he drew back to let Basil pass out of the room before him.

A surprise awaited Basil in the dining-room as he came down, after hurriedly brushing his hair to an admirable smoothness. By the opposite door Marguerite and Laurence were entering, and for the first time in his affectionate acquaintance with the “Gamin” he completely forgot her presence, for the lithe figure beside her and overtopping her by half a head almost took his breath away. Graceful as it is granted but few to be, “Miss Independence,” as “Antinoüs” had called her—was, outwardly, at least, perfection. Her long hazel eyes had that slight droop at the outer edges of the lids which makes so much for beauty and expression; her small, well-cut mouth and high-bred features, the oval of her jasmine-white face, and her coronal of warmly auburn braids, made up an altogether uncommon ensemble. Clad in vaporous lace-incrusted batiste of a creamy tint, melting into that of her exquisite skin, a knot of deep-red carnations carelessly thrust in her softly folded satin belt was the only touch of color about her, and Basil’s eyes very nearly transgressed the dictates of good form as he looked at her. Truly, Plenhöel was difficult to please, he thought, taking his seat beside “the Marvel,” as he already inwardly named her.

The poor “Gamin,” although her rebellious tresses were now as neat as Laurence’s own, her crumpled serge replaced by a pale-pink linen of irreproachable chic, remained during the entire meal unobserved by her big cousin; but she, nevertheless, filled her place as mistress of the house excellently well, and with a little air of importance that sat very prettily upon her extreme youthfulness. However, “Antinoüs,” always immensely proud of his daughter, seemed lost in contemplation of this charming vis-à-vis, so that at first the conversational ball rolled uninterruptedly between the two others; but as a matter of fact he was thinking of some retrievers that were coming from England that week to add the charm of their thoroughbredness to his kennels—already too expensive, for, in the modern sense of the word, at least, he was not what is termed a very wealthy man.

After luncheon, the storm having not as yet abated, the little party went to what is called at Plenhöel the Galerie des Ancêtres—a particularly attractive apartment in which to spend a wet afternoon. Hung with ancient tapestries and decorated with armor of the best period, with an antique banner drooping here and there along the paneling above a row of knights’ stalls of heavy carven wood, this, together with a succession of splendid family portraits, preserved there the touch of the long ago, for the rest of the furnishings were amusingly heterogeneous. The great room terminated at both ends in monumental fireplaces. Fronting one of these was a huge billiard-table, balanced by a Pleyel grand piano, and opposite, to one side of the other chimneypiece, a large-sized organ was flanked by enormous palms in bronze tubs, while the rest of the thirty-odd yards of space was most variously occupied—tables great and small, loaded with albums, books, magazines, and flower-filled vases; a collection of sofas, pouffs and piled-up cushions; and many arm-chairs and benches, ranging from angular Gothic shapes to the most approved and lazy forms of to-day.

Here one could smoke, read, nap, or play games of all sorts without let or hindrance, since, besides the billiards, a set of graces, a game of bagatelle, a chess-board, a Dutch top flanked by its individual paraphernalia, and even a jeu de petits chevaux were ready to hand.

To-day, however, a strange and unaccustomed atmosphere seemed to pervade this home-like and delightful retreat. Basil, perhaps exhausted by his unwonted loquacity at lunch, had fallen silent, and stood near one of the windows, gazing dreamily at the soupy gravel drive and the dripping trees. Antinoüs, sunk to the shoulders into the mellowness of a brocaded smoking-chair, pulled pensively at his mustache, his eyes idly wandering over the pages of a two-days-old number of the Gazette de France, and neither of them said a word. Still, Marguerite and her guest, sitting side by side on an ottoman placed in a far-off embrasure, made up for it by chattering like magpies—but sotto voce, so that their “confidences” should not be overheard. In truth, their “confidences” had so far remained completely one-sided. Laurence spoke in a sufficiently lively fashion, but revealed nothing of her own doings and thoughts. That she was drawing out the “Gamin” with superior skill would have been patent to a less simple little soul than Marguerite’s.

“But,” Miss Seton said at last, “you never told me that you have Russian relatives.” And her eyes slid a furtive glance in the direction of Prince Basil.

“Didn’t I?” Marguerite laughed. “I never thought of it in our convent days. You see, I did not know my cousin Basil then quite as well as I do now. It is like this. My grandfather’s sister, Anne de Plenhöel, married Pierre Palitzin, and became Basil’s grandmother. Am I expressing myself clearly?”

“Very clearly. And is Prince Basil an only child?” Laurence spoke in the tone of one who desires, out of mere politeness, to keep up a rather boring dialogue.

“Oh dear, no! He has the most exquisite sister. She married another relative of ours, Jean de Salvières. It’s quite a mixed affair, those family ties of ours, like a Neapolitan ice, pink, and green, and mauve, and lemon, in stripes.”

“De Salvières.... The Duke?” mused Laurence, aloud.

“Yes! The Duke, of course! Do you know him, Laurence? He has a château on the Normandy cliffs—the château—le plus beau château de France, I believe honestly; and so picturesque, with its machicolations, its keep, its dungeons, and turrets and towers! It looks as if Gustave Doré had built it. Also Basil has two brothers—the youngest, who is in the Corps-des-Pages of the Czar, and then André, an officer in the Chevaliers-Gardes, all white and gold and silver, and taller even than Basil, with big blue eyes, a yellow mustache, a complexion as rosy as a baby’s, a—”

“He must be lovely,” interrupted Laurence, “and look as if he had rolled about on a rainbow, your cousin André.”

Marguerite stared. The tone rather than the words surprised her. This quaint little being, still at the tender age of easy laughter and easy tears, hated mockery when it was directed toward what she loved and honored. Her slangy childish tongue, so apt to speak at random, never gave its assistance to unkind sayings, and for the second time since they knew each other Laurence felt that she had struck a false note. Indeed, the “Gamin” looked at that minute like a small game-cock of ruffled plumage and sparkling eyes.

“I beg your pardon. I did not know a harmless joke could offend you,” Laurence apologized.

“It did not offend me!” stoutly declared Marguerite. “But—I don’t know why—I can’t bear to have my people laughed at.”

“Your people! You are so excessively and exclusively a Bretonne, that one cannot realize your claiming kin with Muscovites.”

“When I say my people I mean all who belong to me, which includes, of course, the Palitzins.”

Again Laurence, not quite at her keenest on this occasion, overstepped the bounds of prudence, certainly those of Breton delicacy—which are finely drawn—for, piqued at Marguerite’s plainness of speech—perhaps at something else, too—she quickly retorted:

“I am inclined to believe that you are in love with Prince Basil!”

Marguerite’s blue eyes widened, her pretty lips straightened, and she rose to her feet.

“I am sure papa must be fainting with ennui,” she said in a level voice. “Let’s go and challenge him to a game of billiards. It is his hour for play!” And she glided off with the lithe grace which betrays great strength concealed in satin softness.

“The cut direct!” Laurence muttered, following her, and smiling in a fashion that strove, quite unsuccessfully, to be pleasingly indulgent. “Bother these Breton prudes! I’ll have to mend my paces here, it seems,” she muttered, as she crossed the gallery.

CHAPTER III

If the tongue’s a consuming fire,
Then judging by the consternation
The written syllables inspire,
A letter is a conflagration.

“I’m sure you must be mistaken. It cannot be possible!”

Madame Gervex, Marguerite’s governess and companion, turned her perplexed, good-natured face toward the gray-haired land-steward who had begun his labors at Plenhöel in the time of the present Marquis’s father. They were standing together on the far end of a lower side terrace overlooking the green silver of the bay, to-day in one of its most charming and innocent moods. There was scarcely a ripple to be seen: a mere fringe of dainty foam hemmed the rising tide as it lazily fretted up the narrow pebbly beach. A cable-length or so beyond that lace-like border a large float rode at anchor, and Marguerite, Laurence, Basil, and “Antinoüs” were alternately to be descried taking glorious headers from its snowy planking into the placid depths.

“Impossible, Madame Hortense? And why impossible, if you please?” Sulian Quentin asked, with some asperity. “You are so soft-hearted and innocent yourself that you can’t think anybody is made otherwise! Now I tell you—” And he emphasized each separate word with a smart tap of two fingers of his right hand on the hard, open palm of his left. “I tell you that this fine Demoiselle from over the Channel is well worth watching. Sweet as honey when she speaks to you, but her linings have been dipped in gall, just the same. Bitter! Madame Hortense! Bitter she is to the very core, and envious and mean, and capable of anything that’s not straight. I, Sulian Quentin, tell you this, and you’d do well to take my word for it!”

“But, Monsieur Sulian!” interrupted Madame Hortense.

“There’s no Monsieur Sulian about it. D’you imagine that I’ve navigated for fifteen years before taking hold of things here for defunct Monsieur le Marquis, without learning how to keep my eyes open? Bah! I’ve seen in my time many sorts of female quality, brown and red and blond and black, pretty and otherwise, clever and stupid, good, bad, and worse, but just such a piece as this one—!” He left his indictment incomplete, perhaps for lack of expressions fitted to his listener’s ears, and allowed his long arms to fall to his sides in a discouraged manner.

“But,” Hortense Gervex began again—“but what in the world made you take such a dislike to Mademoiselle Seton, Monsieur Sulian? She’s doing you no harm!”

“Yes, believe that and drink water!” he derisively retorted. “Look at her now, do, just to oblige me!” He was angrily pointing downward, and Hortense Gervex bent over the coping to see what he meant.

Plenhöel and Marguerite were swimming shoulder to shoulder toward the open sea, with that calm, regular stroke which is so telling for long-distance work. On the float Basil’s tall form showed clear as wax against the pale shimmer of the water, and, with her back turned to him, sat Laurence, on the very edge of the planking, her feet dipping in the sea, her hair falling around her mantle-wise and trailing behind her. Suddenly she turned, swung herself up on the float, and stood before him, her arms uplifted to raise above her head the shining mass of her tresses, her perfect figure displayed to its best advantage by a bathing-dress of pure white cashmere that clung very lovingly; and there was something so challenging in her statuesque pose that the term of “professional beauty,” naïvely applied to her a fortnight or so before by Marguerite, took on, indeed, a newer and more expressive meaning.

“The minx!” grumbled the old steward, elbow to elbow with Madame Hortense. “Oh, she’ll net him, never fear—and to think that our Marquis, always so malin, alert, and wide awake, does not notice her manœuvers! As to Mademoiselle ‘Gamin’—” He paused, blew out the air from his chest with a sigh like a Triton’s, and resumed: “She’s too young, thank the Saints, to perceive such wickedness, and yet she’s sharp as a needle, and some day she’ll see, and then!”

“Well what? What will she see some day, you old mischief? What will happen some day, according to you? After all, isn’t the Prince free to marry whom he chooses? Isn’t he rich enough for two? Why shouldn’t he have a beautiful wife if he likes to? Have you any personal objection to offer, Monsieur Sulian?”

Astounded by this abrupt style of address, so entirely foreign to gentle, kindly Madame Hortense, Sulian Quentin turned to her, his self-advertised eyes wide open.

“D’you mean to tell me,” he impressively pronounced, “that you’d approve of this one for him?”

Madame Hortense glanced meditatively in the direction of the float. “What have I got to approve or disapprove of in such a matter?” she said in a tone that went far toward answering his question. “Who are we, anyhow, to judge our masters?”

Quentin gave a short laugh. “Who indeed? Who are we, indeed? We who have served them loyally for year after year this long, long time; served them, and loved them, too! Yes, loved them as if they were our own children: defunct Monsieur le Marquis, and Madame la Marquise, and our present Monsieur le Marquis and Mademoiselle ‘Gamin.’”

“But what have they got to do with it?” asked Madame Hortense, beginning to feel utterly bewildered.

Quentin went back a step and glared at her.

“You’re a bat—a real genuine bat!” he said, contemptuously, “that’s all I’ve got to say. Daylight is nothing to you, so you might as well go on traveling in darkness all your days! Oh, have it your own way! Don’t think again; it would be idle; but still let me compliment you on your sharpness, ma bonne dame. Nothing to them!... Nothing to them! That’s a good one!”

He raised his arms far above his head in impotent protestation to an unkind Heaven, and, turning raspingly on his heel, left her without further ceremony to digest his cynical advice.

During Marguerite’s convent days Hortense Gervex had lived at Plenhöel as a very superior sort of housekeeper, looking, together with Quentin, after the Marquis’s interests, and keeping the château continually ready to receive him in the intervals of his trips to known and sometimes unknown portions of the globe. Years before, when widowed at twenty by the premature drowning of her husband, a fine young sailorman in command of a coasting steamer, she had come to Plenhöel as companion and reader to “Antinoüs’s” mother. She was now fifty-five, extremely well preserved, and very comely, with her thick blond hair, slightly frosted with silver above the temples, her wholesome face, and calm, blue-green eyes; and she literally adored the “Gamin.”

After Quentin’s departure she remained for a few moments more, watching the bathers frolicking in the wavelets below. Marguerite and her father were swimming back now, and presently ran foul of a school of porpoises playing “follow-my-leader” with the utmost gaiety. Madame Hortense saw Marguerite dive suddenly and come up immediately behind a big, shining fellow, whom she playfully slapped on the side. Girl and fish disappeared together in a quick smother of foam; then the fair head, darkened by immersion to a golden brown, emerged again and followed in the wake of the paternal one.

“Ah, my little mermaid!” murmured Madame Hortense. “Ma jolie petite sirène! Is what that scamp of Quentin hints at truly possible?”

Her affectionate eyes followed the thought to the float, and their expression slowly hardened. Laurence was still standing before Basil in the same provocative attitude, still busy with her splendid hair, twisting and untwisting it, as though to wring it dry. The hidden sun had just made up his mind to peep through his veil of pearly vapors, and a primrose glow of delicious warmth suffused the two figures. In that revealing light Madame Hortense became suddenly aware of the science that had presided over the making of Miss Seton’s costume, in spite of all its maidenly whiteness. The young girl’s illuminated silhouette all at once seemed terribly shocking to her in its Venus-like beauty—(Vénus sortant de l’onde)—and with a short exclamation she too turned on her heel and, running up the steps to the esplanade, rapidly entered the château. Her brows were knit and the flame of indignation shone warlike in her eyes.

The way to her own domain led past the suite of rooms occupied by Laurence, and with perfect deliberation she opened the door of the boudoir off the sleeping-apartment and entered.

This suite, comprising a bed, dressing and bath room, besides the boudoir in question, was designated by the household as la volière; for the whole plan of decoration was based upon bird life. It had been a fantasy of a Marquise de Plenhöel, arriving as a bride there from the Court of Versailles, to evolve for her own personal use this dainty retreat, so completely at variance with the grim fortress on the coast of Finisterre. She had been of a gay and witty spirit, had this pretty Marquise, and this was testified by the ingenuity with which these embellishments had been planned.

From the exquisite lampas covering the walls, where flights of winged things seemed alive amid branches of pale brocaded roses and apple-blossoms, from the curtains and portières of like material, the beautifully medallioned and painted ceilings, the pink-marble fireplaces and faintly gilded cornices, down to the very carpets, lounges, and chairs, birds and flowers were repeated in every imaginable hue and tint. Carved, embroidered, painted, and chiseled, the feathered tribes hovered between garlands of bloom as admirably preserved as if the hands of the artists had but just put the finishing touches to their gracious task. The inspirer of it all had died on the guillotine in 1794, but her pastel portrait hanging in the boudoir smiled the imperishable smile of an all-conquering loveliness and charm.

Her azure gaze, so proud and high-bred beneath the powdered and diamond-dewed waves of her coiffure, riveted Madame Hortense’s attention, as it always did when her duties called her to that portion of the State Apartments. She paused before the cupid-wreathed flame, and gazed at the slender waist in the silk-and-lace corselet of a Court toilette; at the slim hands clasped over the nacre sticks of a point d’Argentan fan; at the trail of jasmine intermingled with strands of great pearls, crossing like the ribbon of some Order from the right shoulder to the left ride of the cloth-of-silver girdle, and she sighed profoundly.

“Ah! quelle pitié!” she whispered, “quelle pitié!” Then, struck by a sudden thought, she bent swiftly forward. “How Marguerite resembles her!” she resumed, half aloud. “I had never noticed that before.” And a shade of fear darkened her own eyes for an instant. But she had not come to indulge in vain contemplations and vague forebodings. So, straightening herself, she cast a quick look about the room. Inside one of the window-places a Louis XVI. desk of celadon-green wood, inlaid preciously with more birds and flowers, had been left open. On the velvet-covered writing-board lay, in unpleasant contrast, one of those eminently durable and business-like blotting-books for which the world is indebted to England. Covered in pigskin, it displayed the large, flat monogram, L. S., in visibly extra-solid silver, while a fountain-pen of similar usefulness and practicality had been uncapped, in dangerous proximity to the softly faded lining of the desk.

If ever there existed a scrupulously honest and loyal woman, Madame Hortense was that one. Yet without any hesitation whatsoever she stepped to the window and resolutely opened the blotting-book. Between the rough leaves there was nothing save a few clear sheets of lavender-gray note-paper bearing the same letters, L. S., in violet and gold, and Madame Hortense let the covers fall together with some abruptness. She glanced into the immaculate depths of a beribboned basket near by, and was on the point of passing on into the adjacent bedroom when the violent stain made by a crimson-morocco volume on the pale loveliness of the room made her stop and take up the eye-offending object. “Scott’s Poems, by Scott. For a good little girl,” was the enlightening device she read on the fly-leaf, writ in an angular and manful, if not masculine, hand, and this was signed, “From Aunt Elizabeth.” Madame Hortense lacked perhaps a keen sense of humor, but yet she laughed, and was about to thrust the double absurdity out of sight when it slipped from her fingers and fell with a crash to the floor, flying open as it fell, and flinging half a dozen sheets of the lavender-gray paper in as many different directions.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” quoth Madame Hortense in three different tones, quickly picking them up. “So that’s the letter-box, eh?”

She was a trifle short-sighted, and, holding the loose pages close to her eyes, began to read. She knew English very well, and followed without the least trouble the small, neat lines of script that were disposed to slant diagonally down the sheets toward the outer corners, and as she read her kindly features gradually altered into something almost approaching a tragic mask. When she reached the last word of two copious epistles she confided them once more to Scott’s care, replaced his poems on the table where she had found them, and left the room with a curiously stiff gait, suggesting the Statue du Commandeur in “Don Juan.”

“So,” she thought, stalking wrathfully away, “Milady has a lover ... an English lover—created by Divine Providence expressly for her, excepting that he is not rich—an officer in the Life Guards, poor fellow!” Pausing for an instant, she leaned against the stair banister to reflect the better.

“Also,” she went on, mentally commenting, “she has a confidant—a cousin ... he is in the Scots Guards—to whom she tells all her little plots! Parfaitement! Mademoiselle Seton is well provided so far. Add to this a millionaire Russian Prince anxious to become her prey, it seems, and an American youth also possessed of vast wealth, but, alas, untitled, who likewise is in love with her, and we have the situation clear as mud. A very pretty situation indeed! Quentin is really no fool!”

She shook her head dismally, disarranging thereby the spick-and-span neatness of her undulated bandeaux crowned by a bow of creamy lace, and sought her own rooms, resolved to watch minutely the sorry game that—chance somewhat assisting—had just been revealed, and which presented many hitherto undreamed-of but very dangerous possibilities.

She who was here to watch over little motherless Marguerite at once began to heap a thousand undeserved reproaches upon herself for what she termed her unpardonable negligence, and felt indeed that in the last half-hour she had become a sadder if a wiser woman.

CHAPTER IV

Ask; I will not deny, within the strength
Courage and Honor may descry in me.
Ask of my service to the utmost length
And I will give it thee.

Marguerite was sitting on the short salt-grass at the top of the souffleur cliff. Beside her was a large reed basket, half filled with mousserons—those toothsome little pale-yellow mushrooms that grow in perfect circles all over the table-land—perfect circles, from which, however, one mushroom is always missing, because these erratic cryptogams appear only where the Farfadets (elves) have danced during the night, a member of their company lying on watch at full length upon the ground while they merrily disport themselves in an all but complete ronde.

The gray-green sward was still dotted with the quaint formation close to Marguerite, but she had stopped harvesting them, and sat idly—a strange thing for her to do—evidently absorbed in the evolutions of the gulls, which kept plunging headlong down to the blue waves, apparently for no other purpose than to fly immediately up again and preen their plumage in the veiled sunlight of the cliff-top.

There was an indefinite expression in Marguerite’s attitude which had never been there before: not lassitude, not ennui, but a queer lack of that verve and elasticity hitherto one of her greatest charms. Her delicious face, so like the pastel in the boudoir of the volière suite, was much as usual beneath the brim of her sailor-hat, her slim waist as supple, her shoulders as straight and well drilled as ever, and yet, and yet—?

Nobody had noticed any change in her, however, so change assuredly there could not be.

A quick step behind her made her turn and see Basil advancing in long strides from the “castle-path”—as the yard-wide track westward along the falaise is distinguished from the one in the opposite direction.

“Had a pleasant ride?” she queried, as he came up, instinctively making room for him beside her, as though there had not been mile after mile of room on both interminable stretches to east and to west.

“Yes,” he replied, lowering himself to the grass at her side and pushing back his cap to let the strong sea-breeze cool his forehead. “A very nice ride. But why didn’t you come with us, my dear little ‘Gamin’?”

His dear little “Gamin” resumed her contemplation of the whirling gulls, her eyes averted from him.

“Oh,” she replied, lightly, “I didn’t feel like riding to-day. Besides, these mushrooms needed cutting.”

Basil laughed. “A fine excuse!” he declared. “And as to your not feeling like riding, you who, so to speak, have been born on horseback—a little Centauress!”

He bent sideways to see her face, but she petulantly left a mere profile for his inspection.

“Oh, there’s an eagle!” she exclaimed, pointing to a distant crag, where a solitary bird of great size had just alighted.

“An eagle! Yes, I think it must be an eagle,” he amiably corroborated, without troubling to look in that direction. “Let him be; he is well enough there. Can’t you be serious a moment, ‘Gamin’? I want to speak to you.”

His face was grave now, and the tone of his voice made her veer round with a sudden anxiety.

“Anything wrong?” she asked.

“No, of course not ... I only wish to ... ask your advice about a personal matter. You are a very wise little person, sometimes, you know.”

“Am I? It’s the first time I hear of it!” she exclaimed. “It sounds very nice!”

“I’m glad it does, ‘Gamin,’ because it’s the plain truth. And I am sorely in need of wisdom just now, having apparently none left of my own.”

Marguerite laughed, and a quick blush followed the laugh.

“Set forth the case for judgment,” she said, reaching to gather a dewy mousseron and tossing it negligently into the basket; but he suddenly caught her hand and held it tightly in his.

“Look here!” he pleaded. “I cannot speak if you don’t keep quiet. What I have to say is not so awfully easy.”

“It is serious, then?” she questioned, hesitatingly, her fingers remaining his willing prisoners.

“Very serious.”

The “Gamin” slowly shifted her head, and her luminous eyes met his frankly.

“Speak then,” she said in an odd voice, which seemed all at once a little strangled.

“Well!” Basil began. “Well—now supposing you were asked ... would you ... would a young girl like you find me too old to—to marry?”

Marguerite started and drew her hand firmly away. There was a silence during which the clamor of the gulls became enervatingly loud. A hurtling squadron of noisy birds swept over Marguerite’s and Basil’s heads, settled in disorder on the grass ten yards farther on, and instantly ceased shrieking.

“Well?” Basil, who had also fallen into a bird-study, resumed with an effort.

“Well, I told you so before. You are not so very old.” There was a pitiful little attempt at humor and lightness in the words. “I ... you see ... I was teasing you that day.... I was much younger then.”

“Much younger,” he expostulated, “four weeks ago!”

“Four weeks—is that all?” she wondered.

“Yes, just four weeks to-morrow. I remember because ... never mind why.... But you have not really answered me.” He recaptured her hand and pressed it. “Do, ‘Gamin,’ do, please say something encouraging!” he murmured, almost in her ear, and quite unconsciously drawing her toward him.

Her graceful body stiffened, and almost immediately relaxed again. The hand in his was trembling a very little.

“I think you would make a very nice husband,” she said, innocently, not in the least aware of what she was saying.

A quick smile lighted up Basil’s eyes. “You dear child!” he whispered. “You little darling!”

Marguerite sat quite still waiting—waiting for she knew not what; her heart beating so fast that she became afraid he might hear it. Fortunately more gulls were swooping up from below the giddy brink, and the surge of their wings made this improbable.

“Then you would not laugh at me if I were to ask you to—”

He paused, searching for the exact words he wanted, and Marguerite, her lips slightly apart, listened a trifle breathlessly. “To help me?” he concluded with unexpected force.

“Help you? How? What do you mean, Cousin Basil?”

She was desperately trying to conquer some unexplainable emotion.

“You see, I don’t like to ask your father. He would begin by making fun of me!”

“Fun of you!”

“Oh, without a doubt! You know him, Marguerite.” He had never called her Marguerite before, and she wondered why he did so now. “He is barely four years older than I am, you understand, and....”

“What does that matter?” she interrupted, with a happy little smile. “He—”

She checked herself and hastily altered the sentence to a “He likes you very much, you know!” which was extraordinarily meaningless.

“And do you like me very much, too?” Basil asked, looking straight ahead in the eye of the wind. It was a pity he could not see her smile now, or the expression that accompanied the light casualness of her reply, for both were revealing.

“Yes; very much, Cousin Basil.”

“I know you do, my dear little ‘Gamin,’ and that is what emboldened me to ask your advice just now.”

He was still gazing out to sea, wrapped in his own thought, while she waited, a faint tingling in her finger-tips warning her that her patience was really being tried. She moved restlessly once or twice, until finally one slender fawn-suède-shod foot hung directly over the knife-like edge of the cliff. In the offing a fleet of fishing-boats that from that height resembled a mere flight of red-and-white butterflies, were drowsily drifting under slack sails toward the harbor of Kastèllék, behind the crag where still sat enthroned the contemplative eagle.

Absently, mechanically, almost, Marguerite pulled from the rock-border of the salt-grass a fat stem of perce-pierre, and stuck it in her mouth. The juice of that briny plant—eatable only when steeped in vinegar—bit smartly into her tongue, but she did not even notice it, for she was watching Basil intently; his handsome profile, the deep-set gray eyes under their energetic brows, the obstinate chin, and clean-cut mouth by no means concealed by the short, light mustache which contrasted so happily with the red-brown hair faintly limned with silver. Her cousin Basil! She was very proud of him. Was there any other man like him in the whole round world?

“I hesitate to ask you another service,” she heard him say now, and with praiseworthy energy she roused herself.

“Don’t hesitate, Cousin Basil!” she said, with a hint of shyness.

“Do you think you could manage to sound your friend’s ideas on the subject?”

“My friend ... the subject!” she echoed, blankly. Whatever doubt and surprise she might have felt before was transformed into complete puzzlement. She was coming back from so great a distance!

“Yes—your friend Laurence, of course! You see,” he continued, more easily now that he had burned his bridges behind him—“you see, my ‘Gamin,’ ridiculous or not, my whole future life is centered upon her. I fell in love with her the minute I set eyes upon her, and if she refuses to marry me—”

With a wild scramble that all but threw her headlong over the precipice the “Gamin” jumped up. She was ashy white, and as he caught her—as it were in mid-air—he felt that she was shaking, literally from head to foot.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded, holding her tightly in his arms, as if afraid that she would try to escape. “Lord! how you startled me. What do you mean by dancing about like that in such a place!”

She saw that he was badly frightened, for his voice trembled as he spoke, and she disengaged herself quietly, and in a curiously calm tone apologized.

“I am very sorry, mon cousin. I hope you will forgive the scare I gave you,” she said, simply.

“Sacré...!” The rest of the heartfelt string of objurgations rising in his throat bumped against his teeth, and he swallowed it whole, so to speak. She had returned a few paces, and, picking up her basket, was standing cold and pale as a lily, scanning the horizon.

“Plenhöel should hire a keeper for you!” Basil cried, with that vengeful irritation which invariably succeeds great frights. “You are not fit to be trusted out alone!”

“Thank you very much, mon bon cousin!” she said, with a little courtesy in his direction. “Not you, I hope, however. He might find you inadequate—and, besides, if you will now take the trouble to look yonder, behind the menhir, you will see Hortense Gervex dozing over her knitting. She is my keeper.”

“A famous guardian!” Basil deprecated in disgust. “As a matter of fact you have jumbled my ideas so that I scarcely remember what I was talking to you about!”

“I do!” responded Marguerite. “I remember it perfectly, and, acting upon your recent request, I will try to find out what you wish to know, as soon as possible.”

A quick suspicion, as fleet as the flight of an arrow, shot through Basil’s heart. What was this in her voice, her manner, that seemed so queer? He turned and faced her in acute distress; but there she stood, apparently quite unmoved, in a perfectly natural attitude, both little hands clasped upon the handle of her mushroom-basket, and inwardly Basil wrathfully called himself an imbecile. That child—that mere baby—it seemed almost a desecration to have, even for a second, believed her capable of “grown-up” feelings. Ah! Yes, indeed, she was justly named the “Gamin,” with her boyish, reckless ways, her laughter, her merry pranks. Poor dear little “Gamin.”

They were walking side by side, now, in the direction of the menhir, to retrieve Madame Hortense, who, had they known it, was far from “dozing over her knitting,” but wide awake indeed, very watchful, and gleefully imagining that things were going on quite satisfactorily between those two. Marguerite had refused to relinquish her basket to Basil, and was swinging it carelessly by the handle as she advanced toward her governess.

“Wake up! Wake up!” she cried, making a trumpet of both her hands through the basket handle. “Time to go home, Hortense!”

Madame Hortense rose, methodically folded her work, and, coming on to meet them, fell in immediately behind on the narrow track. The grass for yards and yards was now covered with sitting gulls, forming a great restless carpet of living snow, while hovering above them, a host of late-comers violently protested against the pre-emption of what they naturally considered their own particular territory.

Marguerite and Basil, a mere half-head in front of Madame Hortense, were silent. Once she stumbled over a small stone, and laughed at her extraordinary clumsiness when Basil caught her by the elbow. But there must have been something odd in the timbre of that laugh, for Madame Hortense instantly ranged up alongside and gave her a quick, searching glance that Marguerite met with eyes as bright and hard as steel. As to Basil, he was again sunk in his own dreams, and Hortense resumed her former place with a puzzled sigh.

Leaving him on the perron, and Madame Hortense sitting unquietly on one of the terrace benches, Marguerite ran to the stables, ordered her favorite horse, “Gavroche,” to be saddled at once, whispered a few words to the old piqueux, who always accompanied her when she rode without her father, and raced back with nervous speed to put on her habit.

Fifteen minutes later she was cantering across the heather toward the forest, with the ease of those who have begun this sport of sports as soon as they could stand on their feet, but with far from her usual pleasure. As she reached the first pines standing sentinel-wise at the limit of the lande the sun was just beginning its downward course to the ocean-rim, and she realized with a certain joyless satisfaction that earth and sea would still for many hours be bathed in that rose-gold light, which, save on very few occasions, on hard midsummer or midwinter days, is the veiled glory of Brittany.

Nobody at the Castle knew that she had gone out, for she had bidden Ireland, the piqueux, to wait for her in the “yard,” where she had mounted “Gavroche,” and now Ireland was following fifty paces behind on “Méssire-Antoine,” the “worst-minded devil at Plenhöel”—as he was distinguished by his present gray-haired rider from a vast company of mettlesome thoroughbreds housed on three rides of the equine “yard,” very much as the hosts of the château were lodged about the Cour-d’Honneur.

Bending her head beneath the sweeping boughs of the vanguard of trees, Marguerite galloped into a narrow sandy path padded with last year’s pine-needles. She had adopted a pace that suggested flight from some imminent danger, some indeterminate presence that must be avoided at all cost. Her eyes had a fixed, harsh look that certainly had never sojourned there before, and the ungloved hands, tightened on the reins, had a grim expression all their own. “Méssire-Antoine,” fired by the example of “Gavroche,” gave Ireland some trouble to keep him at the regulation distance, so that this worthy began to wonder what ailed his young mistress. He, too, was an ancient servitor, a relic of the late Marquis, who when still a youth had brought him back from a hunting trip in Queen Victoria’s dominions, and ever since then the man had remained at Plenhöel, well satisfied with his lot. It was he, as a matter of fact, who first had put Marguerite on a pony the size of a Newfoundland dog, settled her baby form in the little velvet chair on its back, and gradually taught her how to stick on something less easy. Curbing his evil-tempered mount, he now watched the little figure ahead in the gray linen, close-fitting habit, the thick, fair hair clubbed low on the neck by a flat barret of yellow tortoise-shell, the trim gray sailor-hat tilted forward, and last, but not least, the absurdly small foot with its gleaming golden spur poised in the stirrup, au ras de la jupe. He smiled discreetly as he recalled the winning of that golden spur by “le Chevalier Gamin”—as her father had dubbed her from that day on. It was at a boar-hunt, when, out of a large assembly, she alone had arrived at the finish with the Master. She was only fourteen then, and, as it chanced, on sick-leave from her convent; but the spirit of all the past and present Plenhöels, their contempt of pain, their horror of ever being beaten, had flamed up in her, and the prize of that victory had been the little golden token of knighthood—not only because she had won, but because already then she was bent on always winning, on always being on time to prevent her dogs from being “unsewn” by their fierce quarry, at the kill.

Almost soundlessly the hoofs of “Gavroche” and of “Méssire-Antoine” flew along the felted forest-track, and not once did Marguerite slacken speed until the “Carrefour” of the “Seven Sages” was reached. Why the Seven Sages no one could tell, or had ever known precisely, but here it was at last, a little break of blue sky among the crowding tree-tops, a green island underfoot, luxuriously moss-carpeted all about a lofty throne-like rock indented by seven curious niches, which formed its exact center. Foxgloves in rich profusion proudly swung their chimes of pink bells beneath its craggy sides, and tall ferns of extravagant vigor grew in sturdy clumps here, there, and everywhere. Its towering grandeur made a new idea break upon the painful confusion of the young girl’s thoughts, and she beckoned to Ireland, stopped, and, sliding to earth, stood holding out the reins to him with averted face.

“I’m going to the top of the rock while you walk them about,” she said, shortly, and left him gravely alarmed, for he had never yet seen his gracious lady so very pale, or so abrupt and cold.

The top of the Throne Rock—something of a scramble to reach—was as flat as one’s hand, and to the eye hard as only black basalt can look—and be; but Marguerite flung herself down upon it, nevertheless, and lay flat, her hands crossed behind her head, her eyes searching the pale-blue gulf above for the answer to her riddle, the soothing of her stormy reflections. She kept so still that a robin red-breast adventured himself close to her feet. He bent his head wisely, cocked a wary brilliant eye upon the shining rowel of her spur, advanced yet farther—near enough to peck the hem of her skirt—retreated with an impudent swelling of bright feathers, advanced again, and then with a comically disappointed mien flew up to the topmost branch of a slender birch hard by, and clung there, gazing down at her from that convenient height. Unfortunately, the wide-open eyes, with the faint azure rings beneath them, had no vision just then for the picture he made, with his scarlet breast and fluffy body boldly showing against a trembling spray of purest yellow, such as sapling trees sometimes bear among their summer foliage—a dignity beyond their age and strength, like a silver thread or two amid youthful locks, or a line of pain on a young face; while the sun went slowly on his way and the transparent shadows shifted across the fragrant glade.

For a long time Marguerite lay there motionless. She might have been carved from the rock itself, so little sign of life did she give, and when at length she rose, all of a piece—as was her wont—there was no longer any trace of emotion or chagrin on her charming little face.

“I’ll sound her to-night,” she whispered to the deep heaven above that apparently had given her the answer she sought; and, climbing swiftly down, she rejoined Ireland with a “Let’s gallop home, Irry,” that instantly cheered and comforted her old retainer; for the voice and the manner were once more those of his “Chevalier-Gamin.”

CHAPTER V

Fate plays no honest game, but when
You glance aside or back
She palms the discard slyly, then
Redeals it with the pack.

“Papa,” the “Gamin” said, “I wish we would not go to Paris this winter.”

She was driving “Antinoüs” home from Châstelcoûrt, the home of Comte René of that ilk, “Grand Louvetier de Bretagne,” and she spoke lightly, all her attention being presumably devoted to the careful guiding of her pet trotters, “Scylla” and “Charybdis”—quite a job in itself, being given the tempers of the beasts in question.

“Not go to Paris?” “Antinoüs” asked in surprise. “Not appear during your first season before what is left of our world? Why, ‘Gamin,’ what can you be thinking of?”

“Oh, nothing in particular, excepting of what Monsieur de Châstelcoûrt told you about the wolves in the mountains. It has been years—you heard—since they have been so numerous, which is not unnatural,” she went on, jerking the storm-collar of her long fur-lined driving-coat up to her little ears. “Brr-rr-rr. It is cold ... for Brittany, that is!”

“Not down at Plenhöel!” “Antinoüs” argued. “Here in the foot-hills, all right; but there we have only rain and fog and squalls to our heart’s content, which does not make for gaiety.”

“Then you are not a real Breton, my father—dear!” Marguerite exclaimed, tickling with the bud the glossy hind quarters of “Charybdis.” “Not a bona-fide son of the Celtic Sea,” she resumed, restraining the antics of the deeply offended horse. “Oh, you needn’t tug at your mustache! I am stating a fact.”

“Antinoüs” turned and gave her a quick look, but all he could see was the half of her profile between her upturned collar and the revers of her fur toque drawn down nearly to her brows. Her eyes were steadily fixed upon “Charybdis’s” ears, this unregenerate miscreant being still somewhat resentfully inclined.

“Why don’t you want to go to Paris?” asked the youthful father. “It is surely not only the chance of some wolf-hunting?”

Marguerite replied at once: “The wolves naturally have a great deal to do with it, but even barring them, I should much rather remain here—at home.”

“Isn’t the Hôtel de Plenhöel home, too? After all, it has been ours for many, many generations, which should lend it some of the charm that the old place here has for us. Besides, all our relatives and most of our friends are already in Paris, or will be there soon. Among others your beloved Laurence, who, by the way, is, as a Russian Princess, certainly an astounding success. Poor old Basil! I’ll be glad to see him again, although I still can’t help being sure he was a fool to marry her.”

Of a truth “Charybdis” must have been in a sour mood that morning, for at this point he cut such a caper that “Antinoüs” interrupted his discourse to advise Marguerite to land her team in the ditch before worse happened, and have done with it! The sarcasm, however, apparently did not touch her, for she gave no sign of annoyance, and as soon as the horses had resumed a more dignified allure, he went on, quietly:

“They’ve been married nearly four months now, haven’t they? Sapristi! How time flies! A chance meeting ... a hot-headed Muscovite ... a level-headed Britisher, an infinitesimal courtship, a consent from the Czar, a splendid wedding-feast, a short trip to one’s vasty estates, and here is our interesting couple royally established in the Faubourg St.-Germain, and cradled by the town of revolutions, where they will doubtless dominate chic and fashion. Ah, there’s no denying it! Your Loris knows how to paddle her own canoe.”

“You never did like Laurence!” Marguerite observed.

“No, I never did; I don’t mind owning up to that; and the high-handed way in which she landed one of the greatest matrimonial prizes in Europe did not improve my admiration, either. A girl as competent as she proved herself to be before twenty promises for the future.”

Marguerite was turning her horses from the departmental road into one which opened upon it at right angles, and made a short cut to Plenhöel across the heath. This delicate operation might, therefore, have excused her silence, but her father did not think so.

“Oh, hang it all, ‘Gamin’!” he exclaimed. “You know what I mean, in spite of your sugar-candy airs! You won’t tell me that you were pleased with her—or him, either, for the matter of that; else why did you refuse to go to the marriage on the plea of ill-health? You pleading ill-health! Preposterous! However, I thought that perhaps by now you had forgiven and forgotten, and that you might be pleased to see them once more.”

Had her father looked at her now he would have noticed the wave of delicate color rising on what was visible of her face; but he was irritably drawing his cigarette-case from a recalcitrant inner pocket, and did not see.

“Forgive—forget? What in the world have I to forgive or forget, papa?” she asked, glancing at the somber dried heather rustling along both sides of the road into misty distances. “What indeed; since it was I who at Cousin Basil’s request first spoke to Laurence of his ‘intentions’ regarding her?”

“Antinoüs,” a cigarette in one hand and a vesta-box in the other, veered abruptly in his seat, and stared at his daughter with something akin to consternation in his eyes.

“You!” he exclaimed. “Why I never heard a word of all this! What an idea, to make a baby like you his messenger, instead of asking me!”

“Well, he thought you’d laugh at him,” Marguerite frankly replied.

“He did, eh? Jolly right he was, too, come to think of it. For that’s exactly what I would have done, I dare say. A man like him to throw himself away for the sake of a pretty minx’s bright eyes, and that, mind you, without knowing anything in particular about her.”

“He was right to mistrust you, you see,” she mocked.

“Yes, I see, but it isn’t too late. I promise you that I’ll do my laughing yet. Indeed, ‘Gamin,’ I hope you’re going to reconsider that verdict about not going to Paris. It would annoy me very much to miss the fun.”

For a minute Marguerite did not reply. Another brusque bend in the road lent her fresh reasons for not attending, but when she spoke it was in her usual tone of semi-banter.

“My dear papa!” she said. “If you are bent on amusement, amusement you must have! It is not for an old lady like myself to stand in the way of your giddy doings.”

“Chevalier,” “Antinoüs” interrupted, “you do not always observe the deep respect due to a parent, but I will not repel the hand you offer me in peace and amity. May these words be my guerdon! I was wondering whether you had some really serious reason for disliking to go. And here are our turrets pointing skyward over the pines, so kindly let your estimable steeds have their heads. I am as hungry as a bear. Aren’t you?”

“Very hungry,” she replied, with the enthusiasm of a sailor accepting a glass of water on a cold winter’s day. “By the way, when do you wish to leave Plenhöel?”

“As soon as you like ... or can. The first week of January I think would be a fairly good time. Of course Christmas and New-Year are better spent on our own land. In spite of what you say, I am almost as Breton in heart and soul as you are yourself, mon Chevalier—take care of that stone near the clump of reeds yonder, ‘Scylla’ seems determined to swallow it en passant.”

“Leurs Altesses Sérénissimes le Prince et la Princesse Palitzin!”

The gigantic footman sent these distinguished appellations down the room in the perfectly intoned accents of a valet de grande maison, without the slightest striving after bombastic effect, and Marguerite quietly rose from the place before the fire where she was entertaining some guests. It was the first reception given by the Plenhöels since their arrival in Paris, and the salons were crowded.

Slim and graceful in her simple white gauze dress, that fell about her like fluent frost, the young mistress of the house wore no jewels, a little branch of white heather alone defining the heart-shaped opening of the corsage. With a charming smile she advanced to meet the strikingly handsome couple that was focusing all eyes in this choice assemblage, and her voice was coolly gracious as she bade them welcome.

Laurence was even more beautiful—if that were possible—than she had been before her marriage. Her lithe shape seemed taller, and in her trailing gown of almond-green velvet, bordered with a fine rouleau of ermine, she had something decidedly queenly.

She bent as though to embrace her cousin by marriage, but, though she could not have told how, found herself merely shaking hands with that erstwhile “dearest of all friends,” who immediately turned to Basil, uttering a commonplace compliment of congratulation.

He was beaming with happiness, and when “Antinoüs,” who had followed his daughter, added his felicitations to hers, he actually grew red with pleasure.

“Yes!” he said, exultantly, letting his wife and Marguerite pass on, and detaining “Antinoüs” by the arm. “Yes, I am a lucky dog! Look at her! Isn’t she a marvel? Wasn’t I right when I called her that long ago—and exquisite, my dear fellow, in temper, in manner—oh, in everything!”

Never had the Marquis de Plenhöel heard his kinsman express himself with so much warmth or at such length. Interested by this transformation, he glanced at the serpentine folds of Laurence’s long train, coiling and uncoiling behind her as she walked beside Marguerite, and then back at the once taciturn Basil. He had always thought his cousin a trifle too unemotional, and an amused smile showed under his blond mustache.

“How ill we judge women at first sight!” he remarked, lightly. “D’you remember your first view of Laurence in that gorgeous storm at Plenhöel? Who then would have imagined—”

“Speak for yourself, Régis,” Basil countered, hastily. “You were the one who found fault. I fell in love with her at first sight, I tell you. As to you, permit me to suggest that you were not using your habitual keenness of vision that morning.”

“Perhaps! Perhaps! I always said, though, that she was a beauty, you remember, and now I’ll improve upon that. Marriage decidedly agrees with her, and she has become absolutely superb.”

Once more Basil flushed with delight, for his cousin’s appreciation was not one to be disdained. “Isn’t she?” he said, with almost boyish pride. “But”—with a look of contrition and apology so sudden that it was almost ludicrous—“tell me, Régis, has the ‘Gamin’ really been ill?”

“Why?” questioned Plenhöel, utterly forgetting the excuse made for her non-appearance at the wedding, and instantly alarmed. “Don’t you think she looks well?” All thought of banter had suddenly left him, and he involuntarily took a step toward the place where Marguerite was attending to her duties, presenting one guest after another to Laurence, and that with amazing ease for a girl not yet seventeen.

“She looks adorable, as usual,” Basil said, slowly. “That goes without saying; but I don’t know, she seems elongated somehow ... not thinner ... not taller, either; just a trifle more ethereal; more like a dream.” He paused and fixed his deep eyes on his little comrade—as he had used to style her. “I left a sheaf of sun-rays, and find one made of moonbeams—no, a moonglade—that’s the word—yes, that’s the exact impression she gives now—a quiet, restful, lovely moonglade.”

“You’re getting positively lyrical,” “Antinoüs” retorted, impatiently. “A moonglade, indeed! Why, she’s as full of life as a two-year-old, and as jolly as a sandpiper. Idiot!” he was thinking to himself. “He’s so absorbed by his new toy that he can’t see straight any longer. Decidedly a man of one idea at a time!” And he invited his cousin to come and have a cigar in the smoking-room, with indifferently concealed irritation.

Meanwhile Laurence was enjoying to the full the success which she had encountered wherever she had gone since her marriage. From beneath her long, curving lashes she eagerly watched the effect she was producing, and her rather too small ears—a sure sign of selfishness—adorned with priceless pearls, were quick to catch the compliments upon her beauty that Marguerite was receiving.

“Délicieuse! Ravissante! Mais, elle est jolie comme un amour, votre cousine!” It was intensely enjoyable, this long-awaited manna bedewing après-coup the desert of her past life, so bitter and so humiliating when this ambitious woman looked back at it, now that she had arrived! No more pronunciamientos from Aunt Elizabeth, no more charity from splenetic Uncle Bob—ever grumpy when not aboard his beloved yacht. No! Laurence was her own mistress now, with power and wealth unspeakable at her command. She was beautiful; she was not quite twenty; at her feet knelt a man no less her lover because she was his by the imperial word of church and state—indeed, rather more so—being given Basil’s peculiarly chivalrous nature, his blind passion for her. She had reached to-night the very apogee of all her earthly desires, and therefore that was naturally the moment for her to feel the blood crowd back upon her heart as a voice not heard for seeming ages spoke suddenly at her shoulder.

“Permit me, madame, to recall myself to your memory.” The words were irreproachable, so was the attitude of the tall, good-looking soldier bowing low before her, but she could willingly have annihilated him then and there.

“Neville!” she cried, before recovering her presence of mind. “Captain Moray! How—how are you here?”

“As naturally as you are yourself—madame. I, too, have the honor of being counted a friend in this hospitable house. Moreover, I have just been appointed Military Attaché to the British Embassy here.”

She winced. Good Heavens! What could they mean in England by sending this young man, of all people in the world, to Paris, where she, the Princess Palitzin, intended to make her home for several months out of every year!

“Indeed!” she said, with passably assumed indifference. “I congratulate you.”

“Thank you! I am rather young for the post, of course, but my uncle....”

“It is always agreeable to have friends at Court,” she retorted, and felt horribly vexed at the difficulty she experienced in giving vent to this platitude. She had much to learn, had this Princess out of a fairy-tale—not hardened as yet to the world’s surprises, not controlled enough, alas! to dissemble convincingly the wild agitation his sudden appearance caused her.

Her Neville! The boy she had loved—as far, at least, as she was capable of loving. Her restless eyes scanned the flower-filled enfilade of salons, and dwelt for an instant upon her husband, who, with “Antinoüs” in tow, was returning from the smoking-room. Basil’s personality was of those that impose themselves upon any milieu. Patrician to his finger-tips, elegant—in the delicate French sense of this word so misused by foreigners—a full head taller than most of the men there, he was a Prince to be proud of, a Prince Charming—as Marguerite had once called him—in every possible respect. Why then did she feel her throat contract at the realization that she was, after all was said and done, his irrevocably, and that Neville Moray was henceforth but a figment of the days that had gone?

Basil certainly dwarfed his neighbors; she could not help admitting it to herself; and yet the English guardsman was good to look at, too, and had, moreover, an advantage over him to-night—he was in uniform, the soirée being a semi-official affair—and to a woman a uniform always appeals, especially when worn by men as manly as Moray. To Laurence, so enamoured of pomp and show, it appealed doubly.

Fortunately for her, Marguerite came toward her at that moment. “Laurence,” she said, “the Dowager would like to know you.”

“The Dowager?” Laurence said, slowly, her lips still trembling a little.

“The old Duchesse de Montemare,” the “Gamin” explained. “You know she is the arbiter par excellence of our coterie. Will you come and be presented?” Then catching sight of the Captain, she turned to him with a smile of welcome.

“Good evening, Captain Moray. I had not seen you enter.”

“I have been trying for ten minutes to approach you, mademoiselle, but you were quite unapproachable,” he explained, bending low before her. “I have, however, been happy enough to pay my respects to your father.”

“Ah! Very well. Platnowsky is going to play for us presently. I hope you’ll enjoy it. He has a positive genius for entrancing an audience, irrespective of nationality, creed, taste, or personal inclinations.”

“Hm—he is not the only one,” Neville said, softly, his golden-brown eyes lingering admiringly upon the exquisite contour of Marguerite’s face and form. “Will you sing for us to-night, mademoiselle?”

“I! You are not thinking of what you say, Capitaine. I! Sing after Platnowsky’s wonderful playing, and Señora Vizazona’s folk-songs in A minor!” But an impatient touch on the arm made Marguerite turn and gaze at Laurence, who, with heightened color and a toss of the head that made the diamonds in her tiara sparkle furiously, was attempting to draw her away.

“I am waiting!” she said, shortly.

“I almost waited is how Louis-Quatorze put it!” rejoined Marguerite. “This sort of thing was managed better then.” And with a nod to Captain Moray she preceded Laurence across the room.

“What an exquisite little creature!” mused Moray, as he watched her disappearing into the music-room. He drew a deep breath and made his way unobtrusively to a near-by embrasure, where the window-curtains hid him from sight. His disappointment in Laurence had been keen just now. A few words sent him before her marriage had acquainted him with as much of the facts as she cared to reveal. He saw now before his eyes the lavender paper she always used, and the downward-slanting lines of violet ink closing with this characteristic sentence: “Beggars are no choosers. They do what they must. Pity me!”

From the shadowy corner where he stood, the new Military Attaché surveyed the brilliantly lighted salons with meditative eyes. He fell to wondering why she had written that hypocrite “Pity me!” Basil, still chatting with Régis de Plenhöel, was only a few feet away, and the watcher had to confess to himself that this handsome aristocrat—every inch a man—with the stars of some great Orders on his coat, his winning smile and high-bred bearing, was not to be classed with those whom a woman is very sorry to have married. Moreover, Laurence had been looking not only happy, but singularly triumphant, before his own appearance within her range of vision. Her exultant attitude, her sumptuous toilette, her regal jewels, did not frame somehow with the picture one makes oneself of a poor heartbroken creature—vierge et martyr—forced into a distasteful union; and for the first time his love and loyalty for her wavered.

Presently she came back toward the sofa where Basil and “Antinoüs” were established. She was leaning on the arm of an Ambassador, extremely young-looking for so weighty a distinction, who was obviously delighted with his present rôle as cavalière-servente to the most-looked-at woman in the room. Laurence, her pretty color heightened, her eyes sparkling with animation, was responding to his graceful compliments in faultless Italian, “flying her hands” as if really to the manner born. The two men on the sofa had risen, and the little group was now so close to Neville that he could hear every word distinctly. And suddenly through the archway of the music-room he saw Marguerite de Plenhöel standing by the concert piano, where Platnowsky had just installed himself, and half unconsciously he took a step in that direction, putting aside the curtain, and standing for a second irresolute and half revealed.

Laurence’s eyes, meeting his, changed to extreme harshness, and in a voice new to her audience—especially to Basil—she asked him to have their carriage called.

“Not before hearing Platnowsky!” remonstrated “Antinoüs.” “He is the nail of the evening—and looks it,” he added, indicating the interminable maestro, thin almost to emaciation, and topped by an exuberant mane of dull potato-colored hair, weeping-willowing across his melancholy brow. But Laurence was not attuned to humorous remarks just now, and with an impatient gesture she reiterated what might easily have been mistaken for a command, and encountered Basil’s glance of astonishment with a frown.

“She is afraid of me,” Neville thought, as with a bow he passed on toward the music-room. “Afraid of me! Can it be possible? What does she take me for?” He felt very unhappy, almost ashamed, and especially puzzled. What did it all mean? Could this haughty, overbearing woman be the same who in the grace of all her girlish beauty had spoken so tenderly to him on the moonlit lawns of Seton Park less than a year ago? He glanced helplessly around. Marguerite’s white silhouette detached itself against the lemon-wood paneling of the great salle-de-concert, and toward Marguerite he went instinctively, like all those who needed comfort, or followed the search of the ideal.

CHAPTER VI

Persuade him—he is but a man—
When you have swung the lash above,
Annoyed and hurt him all you can,
That it was done for love.

In the brougham taking them home at the stately speed of their Orloffs, neither Basil nor Laurence spoke. The distance was short, and in a few minutes the “Porte s’il vous plâit” of their imposing coachman resounded before the escutcheoned portals. The equipage turned into a closed court, stopped beneath the glass marquise, and the footman jumped to the carriage door at the precise moment that a Suisse of heroic proportions and dazzling baldric gave notice of their coming, by three short strokes of his halberd on the tessellated floor of the entrance.

Basil assisted his wife up the marble steps and, gently retaining her hand in his own, crossed the hall and ascended the great staircase with her. A double hedge of white lilac and narcissus lined the porphyry balustrade on either side, and somehow or other Laurence felt suddenly as if their heady perfume made her dizzy. She foresaw some sort of explanation between Basil and herself; she knew that her tone and manner had been unjustifiable, and false pride rose in her at the thought of being even ever so gently called to account.

Nevertheless, she let him accompany her to her own apartments without a word, and it was only when the door of the salon d’entrée had shut behind them that she at last opened her mouth.

“It was abominably warm at the Hôtel Plenhöel,” she said, disengaging her hand and walking ahead of him into the adjoining boudoir, where she sat herself down in closest possible proximity to the brightly burning pine-cone fire.

Basil did not comment upon this curious inconsequence, but, bending, he deftly unfastened the clasp of her long blue-fox cloak, and let it fall in a heap on the back of her arm-chair. In spite of herself Laurence was ill at ease. She gave a little laugh, and began to unbutton her left glove.

“They are so old-fashioned, the Plenhöels,” she said, without looking up. “One really thinks one is attending a reception at Versailles under Louis-Seize. Did you see the way that Duchesse de Montemare wears her hair? I really believe it must be rolled upon a cushion, like our great-grandmothers’, and I’d swear it was powdered!”

Basil, leaning against the tall chimneypiece, was looking straight into the dancing pink flames.

“She is the greatest lady in France,” he replied, “and as to the old-fashionedness of the Hôtel de Plenhöel, a noisily modern reception would clash with those antique ceilings and dignified souvenirs d’autrefois.”

“Oh, I am not finding fault!” she interposed, somewhat hurriedly. Then, looking up into her husband’s face, she saw there something that, oddly enough, made her suddenly determined to put him in the wrong. She was not going to let him reprove her, even tacitly—not she, indeed!

“Of course,” she said, arrogantly, “everything at the Plenhöels’ is bound to be perfection—at least in your eyes. Fortunately for me I am not as gullible as you!”

Basil turned a pair of sincerely astonished eyes upon her. For the second time in an hour he felt as a harmless traveler feels when, without warning, he faces a gun-barrel pointing at him from behind a bush. What could be the matter with his sweet little wife? he asked himself. Perhaps she was ill! He had been annoyed and a trifle irritated, but at this thought he experienced a complete revulsion of feeling, and quickly came across to her.

“What is the matter, Laury?” he asked, tenderly. “Are you tired, my darling? You do not seem quite yourself to-night.”

With a petulant gesture she turned away from him, tightening her hands upon the fan she still held. There was a tiny rending sound, and the delicate tortoise-shell sticks fell apart in her lap.

“Why, Laurence!” Basil exclaimed, and, stooping, he lifted her in his arms, sat down in her place, and, holding her like a baby, drew her pretty head to his shoulder. “My dear child!” he said, affectionately. “You are ill, and it is all my fault. I should not have allowed you to keep such late hours. Since we have been in Paris you have been constantly on the go. No wonder you feel done up.”

The broken fan had slipped noiselessly into the folds of Laurence’s train, and she struggled half up, as if to recover it; but he held her fast, and with a shiver of inexpressible rage she suddenly burst into tears.

Basil was nonplussed, but for a moment he continued to stroke her hair in silence. He was not an expert in the queer humors of women, like his cousin Plenhöel, but from his great strength he looked upon them one and all as children, capricious, easily moved to shallow depths of emotion, a little irrational, and always in need of tenderness, of protection, and of caresses. Therefore he bore himself wholly in accordance with this belief during this first difficult moment of their already prolonged honeymoon. She was unstrung, pettish, a little unreasonable, yes! but adorable as always. All she wanted was to be soothed, petted. He did not even mind the sharp points of her tiara, that at every nervous sob came unpleasantly into contact with his chin and cheek. Let her cry herself out, poor dear; that was the best thing for her to do; and, of course, after the storm sunshine would follow! Every married man knows that! He did not question the sorrowfulness of those sobs; they were convincing enough to him.

“I have gone too far; I have offended him!” the silly woman—interpreting his silence wrongly—was thinking meanwhile, her face hidden on his breast. “What shall I do—how explain?” For in spite of herself she was more than a little afraid of him now. Gradually, scientifically, so to speak, she began to temper the pathetic signs of her distress; and at length she ceased altogether to cry, snuggling closer and closer to him, however, as a tired child does with its nurse after some great and exhausting emotion.

“Better now, sweetheart?” Basil gently inquired. “Look up a bit, and let us dry those naughty eyes. I don’t want my beautiful wife to be disfigured by tears.”

He suited the action to the words, raised her head as if it had been made of egg-shell china with one big, brown hand, and, possessing himself of the absurd morsel of lace she called her handkerchief, tenderly wiped very genuine tears of anger from her long eyelashes. Then he sat her up straight on his knee like a doll, and asked, smiling imperturbably:

“Tell me now, oh, Un-Serene Highness, what causes all this big sorrow.”

The manner in which she lowered her eyes and pouted partook of nothing less than genius. Her white breast was still rising and falling charmingly in its frame of velvet and ermine, making the big octagonal diamonds hanging from her necklace throb with prismatic light, and altogether she was irresistible in her half-contrite, half-resentful mood.

“You treat me like ... like a baby,” she murmured, pettishly. “And yet I am your wife, and I have my rights, haven’t I?”

“Most decidedly!” he agreed, repressing a smile with difficulty. What was coming now!

“Well, then,” she went on, twisting the little chain of decorations in his buttonhole between her slim fingers, “why should I not feel hurt when you show me, so very rudely, that I am not first in your thoughts?”

Basil, greatly amused, laughed outright. “So, so!” he said, gaily. “You have discovered all by your own wee self that you are not first in my thoughts! What a clever little woman it is, to be sure! Especially under present circumstances. You should be mightily proud of such a painstaking and praiseworthy achievement.”

“You can laugh!” she cried, leaping from his knee and confronting him, her cheeks flaming with real indignation. “You can laugh as much as you please, but I’m not laughing ... not laughing at all, I assure you ... nor would you if you knew how you have offended and affronted me.”

“Is this serious?” Basil asked, getting to his feet after one painfully astonished glance at her. “A joke must not be carried too far, you know, my dear.”

Laurence blushed crimson. She was as yet a novice at such a game, and her lord and master looked extraordinarily imposing, towering there in that bijou room, walled and ceiled with white plush, like an écrin made to hold a pearl. For the first time she saw new possibilities in him, and a cold shudder ran down her back. Was she to resort again to tears, she quickly reflected, or was it wiser to fight the matter out, and obtain the mastery, now and at once?

“Are you serious?” he repeated, sternly enough now; and she winced.

“Quite serious,” she murmured, trying to steady the trembling of her lips. “It is sickening to see you lost in admiration before your cousin and everything your cousin does.”

“Régis? In admiration before Régis?” he queried.

“You know very well I don’t mean Régis—I mean Marguerite—your precious ‘Gamin.’ The ‘Chevalier Gamin,’ as her foolish father and you call her.”

Basil stepped nearer to her, put the tips of his fingers on her shoulders, and turned her face to the full glow of the wax lights burning in tall candelabras near by.

“What do you mean, Laurence?” he said, quietly. “Is it that you are jealous of Marguerite de Plenhöel?”

“Yes,” she admitted, attempting to shake him off, but without avail, for although he did not exert the least pressure, she knew that she could not rid herself of those well-controlled fingers which nevertheless weighed so little that she scarcely felt their touch.

“You don’t know me yet! I am jealous by temperament; jealous, of course, especially of you; of every word you speak to another, of every look, of every gesture! I can’t help it; I am built that way, I suppose.” She raised her large, resentful eyes to him so suddenly that he let go his delicate hold and remained gazing at her in helpless wonderment. Did she mean what she said? It was difficult to doubt that she was in earnest, but so ridiculous was the charge she made that his face grew grim.

“If this is the truth,” he said, slowly, “I am extremely sorry for it. Jealousy not only denotes an entire lack of confidence and trust in oneself and another, but an inordinate amount of vanity.”

“I dare say,” she interrupted, sulkily, backing away from him. “But you cannot change me. I am as I am.”

“Look here, Laurence,” he said, gravely. “Assured of my love as you are, you cannot be really jealous. Surely I have given you no reason, be it ever so slight, for feelings that are so unworthy of you?”

Her brows met in one straight line above a pair of eyes in which there appeared for a second a sparkle of hatred.

“Well, then, if you love and adore me as you say you do, you might show me more consideration. To begin with, I will not tolerate your attentions to stupid ingénues, nor hear you praise ‘greatest ladies’—as you call them—to my face. I know you have made a sacrifice in marrying me, since I brought you nothing but myself; but as you have done so, I suppose you’ll have to abide by your bargain, such as it is.”

Leaning against a table, both hands grasping its edge behind her, she was absolutely glaring at him, courting a quarrel with all her might, and a dreary sensation of pain and bewilderment overcame him.

“So!” he said at length, in a voice that shook a little. “You are offended because to-night I spoke to a little girl of my family—a child I have known since she was born—and ventured to praise a woman worthy of all reverence and old enough to be your great-grandmother! Well, this being the case, my dear Laurence, I can only ask you what you wish me to do in the future to please you. Remember that I love you with all my heart and soul, and that I am an honest man determined to make you happy at all costs. Now speak, please.”

She, however, did not do so. As a matter of fact, she had by now worked herself into such a fury that she no longer quite knew what she was doing. She vaguely felt that she was acting like a fool. Yet she could not master an intense desire to hurt him, if she could only do so.

“Please, Laurence,” he reiterated, looking miserably across at her, “do not mar our happiness by so uncalled-for a scene! If you but knew how you hurt me—what you are to me—you would not act like this!”

But she kept silent still, and, enervated beyond measure, he reached her in one stride, snatched her up in his arms, and crushed her passionately to him. There was a moisture in his eyes that he did not care to let her see.

“Laury, my little Laury!” he murmured, shakily. “What is the matter with you to-night? Be honest with me at least, and tell me the real truth, instead of keeping me guessing like this!”

She swayed limply in his arms, unresistingly, as utterly irresponsive as a cushion of down, her head drooping, her whole body relaxed; and he bent quickly, thinking that she had fainted. But, no, her eyes were wide open, her face set in extravagant obstinacy; and the feeling of utter helplessness which strong men well know who have been confronted by the Ewig-Weibliche when at its worst wrung his soul. What could one do against this passive force of a being so delicate and frail that one could crush it between two fingers almost, and yet did not dare even to scold for what might, after all, be the mere childishness of a spoiled beauty?

This plea of sudden jealousy on Laurence’s part was so absurd, so lacking in all foundation, that he really did not know what to think. Was it a clumsy excuse, perhaps, to conceal a fit of ... of temper? Surely his Laurence, his beloved Laurence, so angelic until now, could not possibly have a temper to conceal! Concealment and her frank little self should not even be mentioned in the same breath. These reflections only lasted a few seconds, but during that short time Laurence, satisfied by the evident success of her armed reconnaissance, had cast about for some means of escape from the impasse in which she had so stupidly placed herself, thanks to that upsetting encounter with Neville Moray, and had come to a decision.

In another moment she straightened up, dabbed her now perfectly dry eyes pathetically with her handkerchief, and, gliding from Basil’s grasp, began to look contrite.

“I’m sorry to have been so bad!” she murmured, piteously. “I don’t know what possessed me ... for, really, I don’t have those naughty fits often!”

Instantly Basil cast behind him all that had taken place. She was a child, he told himself. Nothing but an impulsive, as yet immature creature, charming and wayward, whom he loved with a great love. What mattered a little cloud in a sky hitherto so pure? Surely he had been in the wrong to take the affair so seriously. He would have done much better to laugh it away, and thus did he begin to laugh and pet her, a change of front which she submitted to with seraphic patience, especially as he promised her—to commemorate their first little dispute—a wonderful bracelet of uncut sapphires she had admired that very morning in the rue de la Paix. What will you? Children must have toys and bonbons to console them when they cry.

A little later, when he had rung for her women, Basil went to his study. It was dark, save for the fire-glow, and he did not trouble to turn on the lights, but stood a long time at a window overlooking the garden behind the house. It had been freezing very hard for Paris—this particular winter being of unusual severity. Every tree, every branch, gleamed in crystal purity. The lawn, which earlier had been powdered with snow, glittered like a carpet of diamonds, and the hundred ramifications of a leafless aristolochia on the end wall made a twinkling lace-like tracery, interspersed here and there with broad frost-roses and ice-flowers against the dark stone. Above this fairy spot the sky was sown with stars, only a little paled by the cold radiance of the full moon.

A growing longing for his own land gradually stole over Basil as he stood there motionless. He drew a deep breath of regret as he called to mind the enchanting nights on the Neva; the music of sleds, the silky slide of sleigh runners, the fitful waves of the Northern Aurora rising and falling like a softly moving curtain behind the towers and domes of snow-hushed St. Petersburg.

Until then he had not paused to think about the change that had come over his life. It had all been done so swiftly. Dazzled by passion, he had never paused to reflect that he was binding himself to a being of another race, another creed, another world, so to speak, and that such a step might bring about unforeseen and very grave difficulties. She had been so docile, so very anxious to please him during their brief engagement. Without a murmur she had abandoned the old faith of her people, for Greek Catholicism. She had accepted—in theory, at least—with touching self-forgetfulness, the heavy duties devolving upon the consort of a great territorial lord responsible for the welfare of the hundreds and hundreds of retainers and dependents upon his large estates, in villages and small towns lost in the immensity of the steppes, the depths of the boundless forests; and she had seemed to fully understand the heavy cares resulting from immense wealth, when that wealth is not looked upon as a mere personal benefit, but as a terrible responsibility for which account must some day be rendered to One watchful of His creatures and their deeds. Deep below the Russian earth labored miners whose task it was to bring to the surface gold and platinum, gems and malachite and lapis lazuli to fill the Palitzin coffers. Vast reaches of field and furrow, of forest and vineyard, were worked by erstwhile serfs of that princely house, in order to fulfil the same purpose. Thousands of horses and cattle were tended upon the plains by troops of herdsmen wearing the emblazoned brassard of Basil-Vassilièvitch Palitzin—the present master of half a province or so—and, strange to say, none were malcontents; for their lord treated them well, and had made himself well-beloved during the years of his stewardship. And now what of the Princess who was to rule at his side? The question was late in coming to his mind. Well-born, well-bred, well-educated, she assuredly was. Why should she not be the absolute partner of his thoughts, his ideals, his plans—and they were many? But would she be that? He passed his hand slowly across his forehead, and relapsed into contemplation of the miniature Muscovy gleaming beneath the moon at his feet and islanded amid the great capital of France.

Paris with its round of gaieties, its music and laughter, and republican irresponsibility! Paris, the paradise of strangers from all parts of the globe; Paris, that from a thorough Anglomaniac had changed with startling rapidity into an Americo-lunatic; Paris, who threw wide her portals to every moneyed invader that chose to come her way, and gave him in return the tinsel-glitter and costly viciousness prepared for his or her reception, guarding jealously out of sight whatever remained truly French and truly decent within her walls, so that none could truthfully speak well of that famous modern Babylon. Basil smiled a little bitterly as his thoughts ran on thus. London, Berlin, New York—he knew them well—were wiser far than Paris. They did not flaunt their evil in the face of visitors, not they! They hid it scrupulously under the thick mantles of variegated religions, suited to every taste and class. Human failings, frailties, and worse than frailties, were shut in hidden places there, guarded by solemn-faced warders who denied their very existence and profited by their remarkable vivacity. And Petersburg—once again Basil’s mind flew back to his own dear capital city, where failings and virtues run neck to neck, and elbow to elbow, in supreme carelessness of consequences, but at any rate without either effrontery or hypocrisy—just like Vienna, only more so!

Laurence loved Paris. It was she who had hinted, in her pretty girlish way, at a speedy installation there, where she knew so many people—friends of her uncle and aunt, acquaintances made during her stay at Seton Park, Wiltshire, and Seton House, Belgravia; her summer cruises on the Phyllis; her short sojourns with Uncle Bob and Aunt Elizabeth at seaside or mountain resorts. Before these she ardently desired to appear in her new Glanz und Pracht, these who had seen her in the character of a dependent—and what a bounty that had been! But what did Basil know about these little secret plans? What indeed! He had found it quite natural for a young girl, full of life and of the joy of life, to want to spend her first married winter in the city of worldly pleasure par excellence. At that moment, however, he began to question the wisdom of his having so readily assented to her wishes. He felt that it might have been better for him to have done otherwise, to have begun by making her thoroughly acquainted with her adopted land, her adopted nationality, her new hereditary dignities and duties. Yes, the welfare of his own people was dear indeed to him, and a flying trip to his chief estate, where she had been greeted and fêted like a young queen, served but little to initiate her to what his life among them, as their suzerain, had really been.

With a puzzled frown he leaned his head against the cold glass. “We belong,” he mused, “to utterly discrepant generations. I am so irredeemably slow and old-fashioned; she is so intensely modern!” He gave his shoulders a shake of dissatisfaction at these shortcomings of his. Then he began to pace moodily back and forth before the huge fireplace. “Oh yes,” he reflected, sadly, “I suppose I will always be saying and doing things she will instinctively dislike and resent, and if she really is of a jealous disposition—” He stopped, pulled fiercely at his mustache, and resumed his pacings and his futile cogitations until his brain grew tired.

Truly this night’s unfortunate events had suddenly disclosed to him an altogether undreamed-of horizon line, and it was difficult to see what lay concealed beyond it. Assuredly Laurence, had she but known it, would have done better to put her hand in the fire, than to shake even by the lightest possible touch the splendid monument of love and trust Basil had built up for her with so great a joy and so great a faith.

Weary, both morally and physically, he at last went back and gazed out into the garden again. Strangely enough, the image of the “Gamin,” in her diaphanous white dress, with her sparkling blond hair aureoling her little head, suddenly appeared before him with startling reality. Her blue eyes seemed to gaze deep into his, and somehow she was no longer the playmate of other days, the merry child who had run and danced with the wind along the terrace at Plenhöel, who had struggled with the window-fastenings, and climbed to the box of the drag bringing Laurence that fateful morning, but a being wholly different; a sorrowing woman developed to her uttermost possibilities in a few hours, a woman possessed of the wisdom of all the ages, a friend in all the potency of the word—a counselor—more, even more than that—some one to look up to and gain endurance and patience from. Involuntarily he drew closer to frosted pane, and, looking out upon the softly gleaming moonshine by which he had symbolized her that evening, it seemed to him that her spirit was dowering the night with all its enshrined loveliness and shrouded mystery. Well! There would never again be the same ease and comradeship between them as before Laurence had committed the folly of naming her as a rival; but did this foolish act break the sweetness of the past, or perchance lend a new enchantment to the power of a personality Basil had not been clearly conscious of until this moment? He drew away from the window, determined to cut short such a train of thought now and for all time. He must be thoroughly out of sorts himself, he argued, and Laurence had been silly to speak as she had done—not quite as distinguished in manner as he had fancied her to be! The women of his class, of course, were perfectly capable of fierce jealousies, yet they were bred and born to keep such feelings to themselves. It was part of their métier as great ladies. Still, his wife was now one of them; she would be taught by example the unspoken etiquette of their decorous world. Besides, he was not the sort to give her cause for jealousy; also he would, as far as he was able, avoid meeting Marguerite. Yes! Yes! Everything would turn out all right—and in the morning—the morning— He glanced at his watch by the last leaping flames of the crumbled logs—surely it must have stopped—or else hurried on without rhyme or reason, for it pointed at six o’clock. Guiltily he stole back to the window and stared at the garden below. All was so very still there—the sapphire-and-silver winter night as yet undisturbed—but as he bent closer he saw that ever so cold and faint a pallor was stealthily clouding its depth, its serenity, and with a quick, impatient sigh he sought his own room.

CHAPTER VII

The sea, the wind, the call of birds,
The leaves that whisper, brooks that run,
No song is ever void of words,
To hearts that beat as one.

Sir Robert and Lady Seton were passing through Paris on their way to join the Phyllis in Mediterranean waters. They intended to cruise along the African coast, putting in a few days at Algiers, a week or so in Alexandria, and then go on to the Bosphorus, which possessed the charm of mirroring on its gracious bosom the minaretted city where a first cousin of “Uncle Bob” was representing his country at the Padishah’s Court.

The middle-aged couple were for the time being at the Meurice, occupying a suite of rooms replete with every comfort, and were at that very minute enjoying a thoroughly English breakfast in their sunny private dining-room. No such kickshaws for Uncle Bob as foamy chocolate and golden-coated rolls light as muslin, but soles fried in torment, with an accompaniment of oysters, truffles, mussels, and a seasoning of white wine; a portentous steak, humpbacked and juicy—as every self-respecting beefsteak should be—an omelette rouged into the semblance of a modern beauty by its filling of tomatoes, not to mention several other odorous trifles in the shape of grilled sardines and deviled kidneys.

Lady Seton was already armored from head to foot in well-cut serviceable tweeds, similar in texture and color to those which adorned her lord’s portly form. She believed in frilly dressing-gowns and coquettish morning coiffures no more than did Sir Robert in over-dainty breakfasts. Solidity, in costly disguise, was what they both preferred.

Ensconced behind the pages of the London Times, Sir Robert was seated squarely before his well-filled plate, and while perusing the news of two days before with the greatest interest, methodically carried his fork to his mouth, and back again for fresh supplies. His wife, without sparing herself a bite, was getting through a pile of letters just arrived, leaning each one in turn against the toast-rack as she read, while “Lady Hamilton”—a sadly obese toy spaniel, and her mistress’s darling pet—sat gravely on a cushioned chair beside her, gloating with all her large, moist eyes over a near-by dish of cake.

“The Prime Minister,” Sir Robert remarked, in an aggrieved tone, “has put his veto upon the interference of Great Britain in—” He glanced round the edge of the paper, noticed his wife’s total inattention, murmured to himself something concerning feminine frivolity, followed by a grumbled conjecture as to whether the Premier realized that he was a public servant, or imagined himself the autocrat of all the Englands, and finally relapsed into ominous silence.

Just then a servant, so prehistorically dignified as to suggest the Stone Age, moved noiselessly from the door to Sir Robert’s elbow, where he stood like a statue, disdainful of employing the typical “cough-behind-the-hand” manner of disclosing his presence, until the shadow of his admirably nourished body falling athwart the sacred pages of the Times did this for him.

“What is it, Berkley?” Sir Robert asked, testily; he abhorred being disturbed at breakfast. “Has anything gone wrong?”

“No, Sir Robert—that is, yes, in a way, Sir Robert; there is a—er—gentleman to see you, Sir Robert, in the reception-room.”

“A gentleman to see me in the reception-room at eleven o’clock!” Sir Robert exclaimed. “Did he send up a card?”

“No, Sir Robert, leastways not that I know of. The chassewer down-stairs”—Berkley was no French scholar—“sent up the name only, by the page.”

“Well—confound it!—what is the name?”

“Mr. Preston Wynne,” Berkley stated.

“Young Wynne! God bless my soul! Why didn’t you say so at first? Show him up immediately, Berkley. Why, you’ve seen him fifty times at Seton Park. Show him up—of course if you don’t mind, my dear,” he concluded, addressing his wife, who nodded consent without discontinuing her reading.

In a moment Mr. Preston Wynne was warmly shaking hands with Sir Robert, after which he reverently touched the extended tips of Lady Seton’s fingers, bowed, and accepted a chair facing the one where “Lady Hamilton” was now enjoying the audible slumber of the corpulent.

“I hope I am not too early,” he said, beamingly. “You know I wanted to catch you before you left the hotel for your constitutional, Sir Robert. I remember your habits, you see!”

“Not a bit too early, my dear boy,” Sir Robert said, with unwonted geniality. “I did not know you were in Paris, though. When did you arrive?”

“Oh, a week ago or thereabouts. Grandma Wynne was set on being here for Ethel’s wedding, and so I brought her over. She’s the most indefatigable old lady in Christendom!” he concluded, with a laugh that revealed a double row of strong white teeth as regular as if they had been carved by machinery.

He was what Aunt Elizabeth called “a very personable youth,” was this well-bred transatlantic, not very tall—say five foot nine—but well built, well groomed, well dressed, and with a pair of keen, gray-green eyes, and a sleek head of pleasingly red-brown hair. Moreover, being the only son of a many-sided father, who had added greatly to a vast inherited fortune by old-fashioned and unexceptionable means, he was of some weight in the cosmopolitan world of the day, amid which he moved at ease and with a delightful buoyancy. He had met the Setons at Villefranche a couple of seasons earlier, and, extraordinary to record, had found such favor in Aunt Elizabeth’s eyes that an invitation to shoot at Seton Park had followed. It was there that he had met and fallen in love with Laurence, to whom he had proposed. That young lady, dazzled by his wealth, his prospects, his father’s magnificent steam-yacht—anchored at the time in the Solent—and perhaps attracted also by the young man’s inexhaustible good temper and humorous aplomb, had been on the point of accepting him. Her infatuation for Neville Moray had, however, stayed her on the brink of a very desirable union. But she had, nevertheless, left him sufficient hope for the future to make the announcement of her marriage to Basil a very great surprise indeed. In spite of this he did not seem particularly broken-hearted this morning, as he sat in the full light of the windows smoking one of Sir Robert’s best smuggled cigarettes. Lady Seton had retired to put on her hat, and the two men were alone.

“Have you already seen my niece?” asked Sir Robert, who (it may as well be admitted at once) could never face a situation of any awkwardness without immediately feeling called upon to put both his large, well-shaped feet through and through it.

“Yes, at a distance,” Wynne replied, blowing three successive rings of blue smoke in front of him, and with such dexterity that they interlocked and floated away amiably linked to one another.

“The day after my arrival I saw her driving in the Bois wrapped to the eyes in amazing sables, and behind a pair of Orloffs that made my mouth water, I assure you. Two nights later I glimpsed her at the opera wearing a diadem and triple necklace of rubies and diamonds fit for an empress. But in neither case did she appear to recognize my humble personality.”

Sir Robert shook his head gloomily. “I am afraid,” he remarked, “that she is having her brain turned by the adulation with which she is surfeited. Personally, I wish she had married you instead of Prince Palitzin, although I am bound to state that he is a fine man, and has behaved toward her with the utmost generosity.”

Preston Wynne half rose, put his hand on his heart, and bowed with gay appreciation of the compliment.

“I am,” he pronounced, “flattered indeed that you should have been inclined to prefer me to one of Europe’s greatest personages. But, frankly, I cannot understand why you ever did such a thing.”

Sir Robert smiled. He possessed, alas! no sense of humor whatsoever, but somehow or other he liked what he termed the quaint ways of this youthful friend.

“Laurence,” he proceeded to expound, “is a curious girl. Not English in the least. Of course you know that we are one of those Catholic families who have never given up the ‘Old Faith,’ but that has nothing to do with it. Our blood is British—just so—and where that child has fished her very peculiar characteristics from is more than I can explain. At any rate, she was never quite one of us—as I frequently tell her aunt—a regrettable circumstance. She might have made you a good wife. You are a sensible chap, you see, who would stand no nonsense, I’m sure. But Prince Basil is quite another affair. He belongs to that class of foreign nobles whom we cannot help but admire, insular though we may be, but who should decidedly wed their own women; admirable creatures; trained to suit them and the high position they occupy. Between you and me, my dear fellow, the feminine portion of our Anglo-Saxon race is rapidly becoming too emancipated, too free and easy, too assured of what they are pleased to call their rights—an attitude, let me add, which will gradually lead to the disclassing of the higher orders. It has already begun to do so, and soon the British great lady of old will have totally disappeared. Indeed, we have examples....”

“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!” the American quoted to himself, continuing to follow his host’s arguments with a profound and most flattering solemnity of aspect.

“Examples,” Sir Robert continued, “which have shown us that blue blood no longer counts for much; that, in short, coronets, time-honored and valiantly won in the glorious past, can be doffed in favor of the red cap of revolution,—sported on the tail of a cart, whence their fair wearers shriek themselves hoarse in the unwashed cause of Socialism.”

Mr. Wynne, still listening politely, was beginning to wonder where Sir Robert was heading.

“Yes,” he put in, dubiously—“yes, of course you are entirely right, but your niece is scarcely of the kind you refer to, and she will without the possibility of a doubt grace the high estate in which she now finds herself. She very naturally preferred becoming a Serene-Highness to being plain Mrs. Wynne of Nowhere in particular; and who can blame her? She was born to the purple; one can see it at a glance.”

Sir Robert rose, walked over to the fire, planted himself on the rug, and, with both hands under his coat-tails, surveyed the speaker.

“I’m glad to see you take it like that!” he stated, thinking within himself of Neville Moray’s visible melancholy when he had met him at a levee some two weeks after Laurence’s wedding. “There’s never any use,” he resumed, “in crying over derailed love-affairs, and this being so, I wish you’d come and dine with us here to-night. You’ll meet the Palitzins and some Breton friends of Laurence’s, the Marquis and Mademoiselle de Plenhöel. They are near relatives of Prince Basil, and it was at their château in Brittany that Laurence first met her husband.”

Wynne rose and drew on his left glove before answering. He wanted just that infinitesimal space of time to make up his mind, and when he had accomplished this task the trick was done.

“Thank you very much, Sir Robert. I’ll come with pleasure if you’ll let me,” he said, smiling. “Good morning, Lady Seton. I’m off!” he added as, turning, he found himself face to face with her fur-wrapped figure. “Sir Robert has been good enough to invite me for to-night, and so, as the saying is over here, ‘Au plaisir, madame, de vous revoir.’”

He was gone, and in all the majesty of her matronly disapproval Lady Seton bore down upon her husband.

“I am amazed at you, Robert, really amazed! What could induce you to invite that poor young man with Laurence and Basil? I trust you may have thought of asking Captain Moray to be here also. It would really insure the success of the party!” she concluded, sarcastically.

Sir Robert’s Olympian brow reddened—his brow always became Olympian the moment his wife appeared upon the scene.

“You are wholly correct,” he said, stiffly, “for that is exactly what I have done!”

Lady Seton raised her muff toward heaven—a painted one, with a Greek key pattern and cupids disporting themselves among roses in merry French fashion—let the muff sink to the level of her somewhat flat waist, and sat abruptly down on “Lady Hamilton,” who awoke with a smothered groan of surprise and pain.

“My Heaven! What have I done?” shrieked the lady, getting on her feet again with surprising agility. “Oh, my poor, poor lovey!” she moaned, hugging the fat, wheezing little dog to her fur bosom. “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

“Stop that nonsense, Elizabeth!” Sir Robert, more Olympian than ever, reproved her. “You couldn’t hurt the brute if you tried. Why, she’s like a feather pillow—most unsportsmanlike to overfeed her as you do. And now please attend to me,” he continued, austerely, easing with a square-toed finger the uncompromisingly angular collar around his neck. “I asked Moray, as I told you, and now I’ve asked Wynne to dine—that’s an accomplished fact. But what I wish to impress upon you is that, Princess or no Princess, I don’t propose to be made to feel like a child in my own house.” He cast a masterful look at the topsy-turvy cupids gamboling above his head, but did not trouble to smile at the idea of having claimed them and the attached hostelry as his own. “If Laurence has so little tact and monde as to be annoyed because she meets her old flames at our table, let her be annoyed; I don’t care a fig about it. So that’s clear, is it not?”

He set his foot with an air of extreme finality upon the hearth-rug, volte-faced, and strode to the door to meet his hat, coat, and cane in the hands of the rigid Berkley; leaving his wife, in one of her most acid moods, to follow behind.

The dinner-table that night was set with all the luxury that money can suggest to French taste, and it was difficult to realize that the silver and crystal, the porcelain and flowers, had not been preordained and arranged by the especial orders of a distinguished hostess. As Sir Robert said, condescendingly, “They manage these things very well in Paris.” Contrary to what Lady Seton had anticipated, a cheerful merriment held the guests from the moment they sat down, and soon the conversation—never failing in genial humor—actually rose to the higher level of wit. This was due chiefly to Basil and to young Wynne, who seemed—much to Laurence’s annoyance and surprise—to hit it off from the first. Lady Seton, usually what her husband described as a “damper,” became as nearly responsive to the pleasing atmosphere of the occasion as was possible for her to be, while Sir Robert, to everybody’s astonishment, plunged headlong—after the fish—into excellent yachting anecdotes. Tubbed and razored, and shedding cheerful waves of bay-rum and hair tonic about him, his ample shirt-front embellished by two large pearls gleaming like moons through mist, he expanded more and more as the well-conceived menu fulfilled its alluring promises, and cast glances of roseate satisfaction around the board. “Elizabeth is a fool!” he commented, inwardly. “They’re all enjoying themselves like periwinkles at high tide.... By the way, she’s got herself up to his Majesty’s taste, has Elizabeth. She’s positively scratched five years off her age.” And so she had. For on occasions of ceremony, in spite of her Galliphobe tendencies, Lady Seton knew not only how to buy, but how to wear a Parisian gown of the best Place Vendome make, besides which her neck and arms were still more than presentable, and her jewels magnificent. Had there possibly lurked in her mind a desire to eclipse Laurence’s bridal splendors? But who is to gauge the possibilities of a feminine brain, old or young? At any rate, to quote Sir Robert, as far as “get up” went, she was easily ahead of her niece by several lengths; for the faint pink of the bride’s crêpe-de-Chine, looped up with natural Bengal roses, was of Basil’s selection, and therefore its exquisite simplicity paled before her aunt’s gold-laminated brocades and zibline-bordered train.

Marguerite—who never cared much for what she wore—was, as usual, in white, something soft and clinging, with an almost imperceptible current of pearl and silver embroidery frosting its graceful folds; on the left shoulder a cluster of her namesake flowers, fastened by an antique silver Breton heart-and-crown, and about her throat on a slender silver thread a silver fleur-de-lys.

So “young girlish”—si délicieusement jeune fille! Basil had thought, as he had glanced furtively at her on her arrival. Now he did not dare to let his eyes wander in her direction, remembering the scene with Laurence only too well. Marguerite was placed diagonally opposite to him—the place of honor was occupied by the British Ambassadress, a handsome woman of fifty or so, whose blond bandeaux retained the silky brilliance that had caused her for many years to be known to her friends by the charming nickname of “Rose d’or,”—and above the yellow and lilac orchids of the surtout he trusted himself only to watch the “Gamin’s” strong little hands, playing with her knife and fork as though she were attending a schoolroom dinette instead of one of her first formal dinner-parties.

Beside her sat Neville Moray, a trifle too silent and contemplative, but still smiling amiably, and Preston Wynne, from his place by the Ambassadress, caught and passed the ball of gay chatter with Basil and “Antinoüs,” his next neighbor. Both were highly amused by his sallies as he related to them a recent trip to Sonora, where the elder Wynne owned a beautiful hacienda. Mexican haut-faits were related in vividly picturesque language, dotted now and again with Spanish names and expletives of a gracious canority, while when the narrator dropped into plain United States his discourse became variegated with cowboy vernacular that brought tears of laughter to all eyes.

“We’re a queer lot, aren’t we?” Wynne was saying. “A regular hodgepodge, believe me! You’ve got to sift the sheep from the goats if you want to have a good time, though I am bound to say that the sheep are not, by a long shot, the most amusing of the two—except when they are mountain-sheep with a lot of kick in them! As to the Dons, they are not half bad, keen as mustard, plucky as they make ’em, and with no genuine harm in them if one knows how to handle the breed. Give me a revoluting Mexican first, next, and always, in preference to some of our hand-raised products, made in Germany, for instance.”

“You have a lot of Germans out there, haven’t you? So have we in Russia, alas!” Basil interposed with a wry smile.

“Yes, Germans are Germans,” Wynne replied. “We don’t cotton to ’em much, but when fresh off the farm they are all right enough in their way. It’s the Germo-American I object to. He who is either born in America, or imported at little cost and so tender an age that he mistakes himself for one of us. We have specimens worth the price of admission, just for the privilege of ogling them. There’s one peacherino I especially admire—a big bug, too, you bet! He came over when he was a little shaver, and began his industrial career as a sausage-peddler out West. He knew a thing or two, though, and little by little he came to own a butcher shop, then two, then three—like the boy who started in by selling sand to grocers to put in the sugar—and ended in a lake-shore palace and the smartest set. Well, this ambitious butcher I’m speaking of finally went into the cattle business—wholesale, on the hoof, and all that, you know—until, having made a pile as high as Chimborazo, he housed his family in marble halls and let madame and her young uns have their fling. Nothing was too good for them—an art-gallery filled with masterpieces, a music-room where the most expensive musicanders were heard. Plush liveries placarded with fine gold for the servants—we don’t say help any more, even out West; we’ve found out the fallacy of it—motor-cars from France, a steam-yacht on the lake—they refuse themselves nothing, and their only shame is that old German father of the whole shooting-match, who has not risen with his fortunes! He is a holy show, it’s a fact, slouching about in an aged overcoat and a shabby soft hat, up at five every morning and sneaking out of his castle to do what? Bet you’d never guess! Why, just as a matter of habit to go to the stock-yards and with his own hands slaughter a hog. It has become second nature to him, and he swears it gives him an appetite for breakfast.”

Sir Robert, who had been neglecting his charming neighbors, burst into a roar of laughter.

“To kill a hog! To kill a ...” he choked, crimson with appreciation. “Marble halls, hogs—help!” he gurgled on. “You are a queer chap, Wynne! I like you!”

“So do I, Sir Robert,” was the prompt reply. “I was afraid my little story might have shocked everybody.”

“Nonsense,” the Baronet protested. “Give us some more of your experiences, do! You take life as it should be taken—on its jolly side. It’s the right way.”

Laurence’s hazel eyes fixed themselves reproachfully upon her uncle. She did not feel inclined to praise Preston Wynne’s gaiety. A man jilted by her should have displayed a fitter regret for what he had lost, and, seeking consolation, she turned toward Neville, who, at least, knew what was due her better than to laugh and joke; but, lo and behold, this distinguished young officer was deep in conversation with Marguerite, who looked exasperatingly pretty. There was Basil, too—her own wedded husband—talking and enjoying himself just as if she had never made him a scene and tried to make him squirm! Her fingers closed brutally upon the Sèvres handle of her fruit-knife. Was her power over the stronger sex on the wane? That would be agreeable! In that case she might as well go and bury herself in the snows of Tverna, as Basil had hinted that very morning it might be wise for them to do. He had patiently explained that the peasantry on this particular estate was being rendered restless by agitators and kabàk orators. Her exasperating reflections were, however, cut short by the signal from Lady Seton, which brought everybody to their feet. Bowing for once to Continental etiquette, she had picked up both men and women with her eyes, and therefore all assembled together in the adjoining salon, where coffee, liqueurs, and cigarettes awaited them before a brilliant fire.

Strangely enough, it was Basil who appeared at home beneath Sir Robert and Lady Seton’s temporary roof-tree, not Laurence; for, disinteresting herself utterly from her relatives and their guests, she withdrew to a side-table and began to turn over the periodicals and papers with which it was littered; her air and expression one of mournful detachment, as if she had long since discovered that the gilding of a cake may, after all, mark but indigestible dough, and was trying to resign herself to this unwholesome diet with angelic patience.

Greatly intrigued by this strange attitude, “Antinoüs” approached her.

“You seem tired, chère madame. Will it weary you further if I take a seat here and converse with you?” He was speaking with well-feigned sympathy.

“Not in the least, Monsieur de Plenhöel,” she answered, drawing her skirts aside to make room for him on the foot of the lounge to which she had retreated. She did not see that he was considering her out of the corner of an extraordinarily mocking eye.

“What I admire,” he was thinking, “are the transports of joy with which she hails the reappearance of her uncle and aunt upon the tapis.” But aloud he said, gently, “You remind me of one of our Brittany wild roses to-night, madame.”

“Why wild?” she questioned, her eyes softening at the broad hint of compliment. “I am very tame, I assure you.”

“Really!” he smiled. “One would scarcely connect you with tameness. You are a pronounced personality, and such rarely submit to dulling influences.”

She raised her pliant figure from the cushions among which she had been nestling. “You think that?” she murmured, well pleased. “I was afraid I was beginning to drift with the tide.”

“A tide of well-deserved success!” he asserted, his blue glances flooding her with admiration. “You are a happy woman, madame, for at the touch of your wand a kingdom has been flung at your little feet.”

“A kingdom!” she scoffed, looking at him between her lashes. “Scarcely that!”

“A kingdom of infinite love and tenderness!” Régis de Plenhöel explained in a suddenly altered tone.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Is that what you mean?”

“It is—or rather, it was a minute ago; for now I perceive that our modern Titania is not satisfied with such a realm alone. Fortunately, however, yours is not comprised within the mere compass of a human heart—golden though it be—and I feel sure that you will wield your scepter in right royal fashion.”

“You like hyperbole?” she retorted, with some pique. “Or has your kinsman commissioned you to plead a cause already won?”

“I am a free-lance, madame, in the Field of the Cloth of Gold, or in that of Clémence Isaure, at your service or your choice. But, seeing you lost in dreams, I ventured to come and offer my belated congratulations, since the other night you were so surrounded that I did not get a chance to speak to you.”

“I accept them all the more gratefully, as it was in your house that my good luck came to me, Monsieur le Marquis!”

“Don’t mention it!” retorted Régis, dropping all poetry of tone as if he had suddenly been stung by a bee. “Besides, if you have any one to thank, address yourself to the ‘Gamin,’ your eternal and loyal champion.”

“I was not aware that I needed one!” was the spirited answer; and Laurence let her swiftly hardening eye travel to the piano, at which Marguerite had just seated herself. Neville and Preston Wynne stood on either side of her, imploring her to sing, and she was smiling up at them.

“Don’t let yourself be implored!” her father called across to her. “You are not yet grown up enough for that. Let us have ‘Pauvre P’tit Gas!’ mon ‘Gamin’!”

Obediently Marguerite pulled off her long white gloves and began to play a prelude in minor that seemed a lost echo of stormy seas, filled now with the voices of great waves against a rock-bound coast, and again with the sweep of the wind in the rigging of a doomed ship.

Complete and absolute silence fell upon the room at the first notes of her surprisingly deep contralto:

“Nul ne connût jamais son âge!
Son nom? Ma foi, pas davantage!
Sa famille? Il n’en avait pas!
On l’avait trouvé sur la plage...
Pauvre P’tit Gas!”

Her extraordinary voice gave a strange pathos to the simple little song, and sent a shiver between Basil’s shoulders. Preston and Neville had fallen back and stood motionless, shoulder to shoulder, listening intently to verse after verse of the quaint complainte:

“Lorsque la mer était mauvaise
Il chantait, le cour plus à l’aise,
Gité, malgré vents et frimas,
Dans un abri de la falaise...
Pauvre P’tit Gas!”

Down went the accompaniment a full octave; distant bells seemed to mingle with the score. One could discern the sobbing at the sea now, the pulsing of the tide, rising, rising, till with a swelling rush it submerged the reefs.

“Or un soir la vague en furie....”

Marguerite had long since forgotten where she was. She was singing as she had so often done on the cliffs of Plenhöel, and her Pauvre P’tit Gas was as real to her as he had seemed then:

“Malgré les brisants et l’orage
Il attint la côte à la nage
Puis il mourut ... tant était las!...
Pauvre P’tit Gas!”

Slower and slower came the words:

“Il fut pleuré dans les ténèbres....
Pauvre P’tit Gas!
Pauvre P’tit Gas!”

At the last wailing chords she seemed to awaken, rose, and faced swiftly round, in evident surprise to see them all there, but utterly unconscious of the prodigious effect created. A little smile played hide-and-seek beneath “Antinoüs’s” mustache; he had heard her sing that before; but the rest had not, and the spell seemed unbroken for a full minute before the applause began. The girl, startled and embarrassed, looked around in a long glance of astonishment, and met Basil’s eyes fixed upon hers in a manner she had never seen before; but when the others surrounded her with enthusiastic expressions of delight he remained where he had stood during her singing, and did not speak.

CHAPTER VIII

A drag upon the hand and brain,
A chain of gold is still a chain.

A huge rack of cloud was driving across the sky at a speed that frayed out long rags from its bellying sails, and trailed them heavily along the tops of the dark pine forest. The earth, but recently freed from the weight of the snow-mantle that for month after month had hidden it from sight, was brown and oozy, dotted with pools and ponds and spontaneous brooks and rivulets engendered by that appalling infliction, a Russian spring break-up.

Hard to bear, even in Moscow or Petersburg, this manifestation of nature becomes in the open country an actual calamity; for it is no small trial to wade from liquid mud to liquid mud, from spongy road to spongier path, while the great wind-storms that precede and follow the breaking of the ice, gurgle and howl and hoot like an army of drunken banshees beneath the arch of deluge overhead.

The solemn ceremonies announcing the formal ending of winter had already taken place. In the presence of the Czar, his Court, and his hierarchy, the cannon rending the hard-glittering surface of the Neva had done its work, and, therefore, officially speaking, spring was born to the Muscovite people. But how dour and morose was this infant season that particular year, shivering and cowering in the cold rain! Indeed, it had not as yet unfolded its very faintest green banner, and continued to sulk away the days and the nights, hiding from all the expectant eyes so impatiently awaiting its advent.

The Province of Tvernovna was being especially ill-treated, and coarse brutality might justly have been laid at the door of the storm-powers responsible for its evil case. There, rivers that had usually been content with flowing like slightly ruffled mill-ponds when once debarrassed of their winter coatings, now turned themselves into raging torrents, demolishing their banks with, so to speak, a wrathful heaving of the shoulder, and spreading out over the steppe in billowing waves, foam-slavered and yellow, sufficient to carry a house off its feet among the débris of trees and bushes that seemed but a smaller edition of the Sargasso Sea.

As a matter of fact the loosed waters had for days been encroaching on the outskirts of the village of Tverna, and already stretched broad tongues and ribbons of wetness toward the base of the slope whereon it nestled below the Castle, until it seemed stranded like a peninsula in a lagoon, and the dark soil floated up by the unpleasing tide spread in an ever-increasing stain over the drowned turf.

The lanes separating the isbas into a very unconventional imitation of blocks was well-nigh impassable, save where logs and lengths of rough board had been precariously anchored by stones, so as to allow the inhabitants at least to reach the kabàk—or drinking-shop—this indispensable adjunct of any human habitation, especially in the North, wherever that North may befind itself. It is a populous village, numbering twelve hundred “souls,” as is plainly testified in orthodox characters by a painted sign at the entrance of the chief thoroughfare. Also its kabàk is of a better class than is usually found in such villages, for upon its once whitewashed walls are tacked highly inflamed pictures of many saints and sinners (mostly obtained from wandering peddlers), and the short curtains of the square windows are of heavy red material, large enough to be drawn straight across the double glass of an evening, when “lights out” should be the order of the hour. Of course the atmosphere of the place is neither better nor worse than is to be encountered in similar places the Empire over. An unhappy mixture of vòdka, kwàss, red-cabbage soup—wherein clots of sour milk are wont to lurk—stale tobacco, and the odor of humanity clad in thick woolens and greasy sheepskins gives it its unfragrant character during the day, while at night these amiable factors are overtoned by the smoking kerosene-lamps which an all-wise Providence has been powerless to spare to the mujiks in this their era of progress.

Tverna has the fortune to be situated in one of Russia’s most prosperous provinces. Unlike Sámàrâ, Vintkà, and many others, it does not belong to a famine government, also the cholera is seldom heard of there, but, nevertheless, it has its drawbacks; for as it is of great agrarian and political importance, it is visited more frequently than is wholesome for it by professional agitators, who, daring the might of Prince Basil Palitzin, invade its purlieus whenever that kindly lord ventures to absent himself. It is well known that when the “presence flag” waves its silken folds above the Castle, peace and quiet abide in Tverna; but the minute it is hauled down and the tröika bearing him away has disappeared from view, the trouble-makers are once more at their evil work.

All day it had been raining densely, and a disheartening evening was setting in, with no prospect whatsoever of better things for the morrow. In the kabàk were assembled the more important members of the village council, the staròstá—a gigantic man, blond as ripe corn, pink-faced, and with a pair of prominent eyes—so beautifully blue that it is a pity to have to call them stupid—and a dozen or so of less illustrious persons, content with sitting in corners and listening to the pow-wow.

Seated sidewise on the massive table was a man of entirely different breed and aspect. To begin with, he wore an ordinary suit of mixed goods, such as any other inhabitants of the world at large might have sported; a scarlet tie—stained and crumpled—showed above his garish waistcoat, and a watch-chain of extreme thickness and brassiness dangled across his lean stomach. Quick, active, alert, lamentably unwashed as to neck and hands, he created at first glance the impression of believing himself to be somebody—a belief that since the morning two or three weeks before, when he had been, as he put it, “marooned” by the swollen waters of the Tvernovo, he had studiously endeavored to popularize.

In spite of his unrecherché appearance and regrettable vulgarity of apparel, he had money—not in great quantities, perhaps, but much more than the few kopeks the others there could afford to carry abroad with them.

During his “enforced” sojourn he had constantly posed for the well-informed person who has traveled much, who reads the “leaves” (newspapers), and he had always in his pocket some disgustingly thumbed brochure of an eminently provocative nature, embellished with prints which should never have seen the light of day—or night, either, for the matter of that—but which he displayed with much pride on every possible occasion. So far, it may as well be admitted, he had not shown himself aggressive, nor had he given any one the right to consider him a revolutionary agent, but mayhap he was only a little cleverer than those who had preceded him, or he was merely biding a favorable moment for a declaration of principles. Be this as it might, to-night he seemed more loquacious than heretofore, and began to engage the staròstá in an animated conversation—the animation being, of course, all on his side, for the other was a man of a really bovine stolidity.

“What’ll you do if the water rises any higher?” the visitor demanded of that worthy. His accent was not pure, and belonged to no district of Russia. Indeed, it had a vague Teuton flavor, too slight, however, to be noticed by his illiterate audience; also his sentences did not conform precisely to the idiom of a native-born Muscovite.

“Do?” The staròstá removed his pipe from between his thick lips, cast a speculative glance at the dingy ceiling, and brought it slowly down again to the level of his interlocutor. “Why, we have already advised the tchinòvnik. What more can we do? It is his affair to help us when we’re in trouble.” He replaced his pipe in its natural receptacle, pushed back his fur cap, and fell silent again, as though the point was settled once and for all.

“The tchinòvnik!” mocked the other. “Can he make the river go back to bed? And what about your tyrant? Why don’t you advise him of the muddle you’re in here? Perhaps he’d be cleverer at that game than the tchinòvnik, and it’s his duty to protect you from harm, anyhow, isn’t it?”

“The Prince?” put in an elder who was lounging by the stove and now raised himself on one elbow. He looked the patriarch to the life, with his long white beard, and snowy locks falling benignantly around his finely wrinkled face. His eyes were still singularly bright under their shaggy eyebrows. “The Prince is far away, and does not know what occurs here.”

“He should know!” asserted the man who had given his name as Gregor Lukitch. “What’s the use of a tyrant if he’s not here when for once in a way he should be—tell me that? Eh?”

The elder pondered for a moment before answering this curious question.

“Well,” he said at last, “the Prince is good to us. We have no cause for complaint. His father was the same before him. All of them were always fine Barines. There are not many like them.”

Gregor Lukitch sneered. “Oh, you ancients!” he pronounced. “To listen to you one would think you had never been serfs, slaves, wretched creatures crushed by oppressors, victims of a tyrannical system that rested like a curse upon you, and still bears its bitter fruits. Good Barines say you? Ach! You make me sick.”

This lofty flight of words was rather lost upon the audience, but a few vague murmurs of approbation were heard to proceed from the corner where the younger men had congregated to smoke vile cigarettes—like kerosene-lamps, cigarettes are modern “luxuries” among the Russian peoples. Indeed, to indulge in “paper pipes”—as they are called—is looked upon as a sign of independence and enlightenment. Unfortunately those obtainable there by the masses are beyond all description offensive, and even the speaker’s nostrils, accustomed as they were to the terrible savor of public gatherings, began to quiver queerly.

“Gott verdamm!” he swore in a most un-Russian way, but happily quite under his breath. “Why do you little fathers persist in rotting the atmosphere with your beastly cigarettes? Here, have some decentish cigars. At any rate, they’ll not poison us!” Which was not strictly true, since the packet of “Perfectos” he pulled from a capacious pocket were, to say the best one could for them, rolled from nicotine-soaked cabbage-leaf, and dangerous-looking at that. The mujik is not particular, however, and cigars are to him the absolute complement of wealth and luxury; so with immense gratitude were the “delicacies” accepted and retained, excepting by the staròstá and the elder, who knew better than to be tempted.

“If I were you,” the irrepressible Gregor now went on, “I would speedily put myself in a position to live on the fat of the land, eat my fill, drink something better than government vòdka, and enjoy life while I’ve got it to enjoy.”

“What’s the matter with government vòdka?” asked a tall, upstanding chap, blond and blue and pink as the staròstá was, but with less of that worthy person’s dullness. “It’s strong and cheap, isn’t it? Much cheaper than when we had to buy it from the Jew innkeepers.”

Gregor brought his shoulders to a level with the top of his small, flat, lobeless ears.

“You make me sweat!” he said, with ineffable contempt. “You’d be satisfied with anything, as long as you can burn your foolish throats with strong alcohol. Why, I tell you”—and here he beat one dirty fist into a grimier palm, the better to emphasize his point—“the government is getting millions out of you, jackasses that you are; and what do you get in return? Why, stuff not fit to wash horses’ feet with. Cheap! No! A thousand times no, not at the price your guts pay for it. Then, also, it stupefies your brains that, by G––, don’t need it! And that’s just what the government wants—to make you more imbecile than you already are. When you had to sell your harvests before they were out of the ground, in order to buy enough to get drunk as often as you could, sometimes you stopped to think. Now, with your nasty little cheap bottlefuls of ‘destroyer’ that you stow in all your pockets, and guzzle from morning till night, it’s much worse. You’re never sober. Oh, you can look at me! I don’t care. I’m speaking the truth. And who have you to thank for all this? Why, your ‘good Barines,’ of course, your high lords who make the laws and keep you idiots under their thumbs. Government monopoly! Yah! Perhaps you were thinking that was all arranged for your benefit. But you are sheep, nothing else but sheep, grazing where you chance to be put, whether the grass is long or short, dry or juicy, never once dreaming of seeking new pastures to fill your bellies full.”

He paused, expelled a generous cloud of smoke from his well-trained lungs, and glanced triumphantly about him. The listeners were becoming interested, as was testified by varied and guttural grunts. The staròstá alone did not seem to relish the joke.

“You might talk more politely of my vòdka, you there!” he commented, raising his ponderous bulk from the bench near the stove. “I don’t get it for nothing, if I do sell it cheap! The government doesn’t make me a present of it, does it?”

The man opened his displeasing mouth wide, and laughed from the tonsils forward, his small, red-rimmed eyes disappearing almost completely in his bilious, moon-shaped face.

“Ah, well!” he chuckled. “You’ll always be the same shiftless good-for-naughts. I’ve told you so before, little fathers. I say so again!” He went on licking his cigar to reattach a ragged edge of pseudo-tobacco. “See, you! Your tyrant married a little while ago. Did he perhaps wed a dame of his own rank, even of his people—of ours, I mean?” he hastily corrected. “No, he’s taken a wife from among strangers, from an island you don’t know anything about, nor even where it is; but I do. It’s called England, and they are all merchants there, and—as you’re so devout—you might just as well know that they have another God than we in Holy Russia. Their priests are no priests at all; they dress like you and me—that is,” he interpolated, “like me, for they, of course, don’t wear your touloupe or your kaftán!” He granted an approving tap to his eminently reproachable trousers and coat, which, according to him, were models of Anglican fashion, and once more glanced about him.

“Not of our religion!” chorused the audience. “Do you say that her new Highness is not of our religion?”

Gregor saw that he had scored a point, and gave instant attention to driving it home.

“They made her take some vows, of course,” he explained, unsatisfactorily. “I’ve read something of the kind in the news-sheets, but can you make a black heifer white by mumbling words over her? Can you change one from the south into one of us northerners? You can’t, eh? Well, neither can the Archimandrite change a foreign woman into a Russian lady fit to rule you as you seem to like being ruled.”

Marzof, the elder, rose to his full height. “You’re talking great foolishness, my son,” he calmly stated. “Why do you come and speak against strangers to us, who have known the grandmother of our Prince? She came from foreign parts, too, and she was an angel straight out of heaven, I’ll swear it. We gave her a name here, for we couldn’t say right the one she bore; that was too difficult for our stiff tongues, and the name we gave her was ‘Raïssa’ (the Heaven-sent). We were serfs then still—slaves, as you say—but she cared for us as if we’d been her own children. When the great sickness [cholera] came, she went from house to house, never afraid, helping us, feeding us, touching us with her tiny white hands.” The old man lifted his fur cap and reverently went on. “May God keep fresh the memory of Princess Raïssa, the blessed grandmother of our present Prince, and the mother of our late master, who, too, was kind to his people, and may He rest their souls in His Paradise!” He sat heavily down again, and Gregor Lukitch slipped from the table to the sanded floor.

“I abandon you—I leave you to your fate!” he clamored, spreading wide his arms, as one who lets drop a burden too heavy for his strength. “I leave you, I say, to your ignorance and your sloth. You will not see the truth when it’s shown to you dear as day. What more can I do!”

“You can speak less, in any case!” came witheringly from the corner near the stove, and a burst of laughter greeted old Marzof’s repartee. Plainly these people—save half a dozen hotheads or so who always drank in every word Gregor pronounced—were not ready yet to swallow his preachings whole; but he was no fool, and knew well that at a given moment in Russia a mere handful of powder will set a province on fire. Where, therefore, was the use of flurry or haste? And as by now his own throat was dust-dry, he helped himself to a few deep swigs of that vòdka he had so harshly condemned—and looked the better for it.

Tverna was, in its way, not a bad village, where it lay spread out like a handful of grain carelessly scattered at the foot of the great Castle. There were not many rowdies there—not at least considering its comparatively large population. A few lazy, leisure-loving individuals, over-fond of drink and carousing, who, if improperly led, might give trouble, but that was all so far.

Indeed, here, more than on any other of Basil’s estates, Laurence would find her opportunity for good, if she wished to take it. As has just been seen, her husband’s grandmother had been literally worshiped at Tverna (her favorite abode), and well-beloved wherever her lord’s dominions extended; although she had, like Laurence, never set her foot on Russian soil before her marriage. She had learned the prickly language of her adopted country with an ease perhaps due to the difficulty of her own native Breton, and had adapted herself so rapidly to the customs and modes of the land she had learned to love that the remembrance of her was living, and very vividly so, where once she had reigned as a beneficent queen.

At the beginning of their wedded life Basil had been convinced that Laurence, too, would become the adored of his people. Her beauty, her grace, were factors in this task that no Slav—those passionate admirers of pretty women—would overlook. She would be pleased by their reverence, he had decided, pleased and flattered by their natural and instinctive deference of attitude; and whenever he had thought thus of the future—which was often—he had represented her to himself riding by his side on the forest roads or wrapped in the furs of her sleigh gliding over the snowy plains, or driving across the steppe in the golden days of summer on errands of kindness and mercy; for if Basil had a serious fault, it was to idealize, almost to the point of rendering it unrecognizable, every object of his love or affection.

That Laurence had not married him, as she so unsweetly expressed it, to go and “bury herself” in Russia, had never for a second entered his brain in those days. She had taken him for better or for worse—and certainly in his mind the latter clause could not be considered to mean the delightful accomplishment of simple duties under the most fortunate and agreeable of circumstances. She was a Russian Princess now, full-fledged and accredited—not one of the many make-believes who adopt the title as they would a new fashion as soon as they are out of the Muscovite dominions, because in the rest of Europe Russian Princes are the mode, and mere Counts and Countesses quite out of it, as it were. It followed, therefore, that she would behave in accordance with her rank—“with her heart,” he had mentally added; and so, even when some doubts had obtruded themselves upon him, when the Paris winter season began to draw to a close he did not hesitate to make all preparations for a long sojourn at Tverna.

Laurence did not openly oppose this plan. She intimated once or twice, it is true, that she would prefer to spend the spring in Paris—in fact, to remain there until the Grand Prix; but as yet not rough-shod enough to adventure herself on what she saw would be slippery ground, she ended by consenting to a speedy departure, albeit with no very good grace.

One thing only pleased her in this complete separation from her present haunts, and that was the impossibility it would bring about of any further intimacy with the Plenhöels. During the past few months she had actually succeeded in persuading herself that she really had reasons to be jealous of the “Gamin”—and jealous she had indeed become, but it was not on Basil’s account. There had been several encounters between her and her husband on the subject. Not very acrimonious ones, nor very violent, but yet quite sufficiently unpleasant to make him dread meeting his relatives when Laurence was present, for her very real hatred of Marguerite made her seize any occasion to vituperate against her. When alone Basil rarely accorded himself the joy of visiting at the Hôtel de Plenhöel, for this joy was beginning to appear to him a dangerous one. Indeed, he had by this curious course of conduct ended by arousing a sort of pained surprise in Marguerite, and a great deal of speculative astonishment in “Antinoüs,” who was gradually but surely becoming hurt and angry at his kinsman’s altered behavior and apparent coldness.

“Cette pie-grièche le rend assomant!” he pondered, which may be approximately Englished as “That sour-minded magpie is transforming him into a regular bore”—and wouldn’t Laurence have loved “Antinoüs” for this interpretation of her influence over his favorite cousin! but, ignorant of the curious inside workings of this family dissension, she rejoiced at her cleverness in estranging them from one another, little guessing what it would result in ultimately. “Leave well enough alone” is a sentence she might have called to mind with infinite profit to herself, but, unfortunately, her narrow, plotting little brain had no room for that thought for the morrow which often results so conveniently in the fruition of time.

CHAPTER IX

The door was shut, and cobwebbed too.
Across the dusty panels grew
Thick tendrils of Regret and Pain,
When Love unbarred, and glancing through,
Smiled sadly once, then closed it to,
And footfalls died away again.

It was a wonderful morning, all aglow with sunbeams as yet unchequered by shadows, for the trees of the Bois and the Champs-Élysées were but just beginning to star their naked branches with gauze-like shreds of tiniest leaf. Even the famous “Marronier-du-vingt-Mars” had scarcely disenveloped its fan-shaped foliage, and its burgeons for the most part still glistened in their smart brown rubber corselets. The sky was blue as forget-me-nots, and some venturesome white butterflies flitted by on gossamer wings as Basil turned his horses’ noses toward the left bank of the Seine, after some hours spent in the Bois de Vincennes, alone, as it were, with awakening Nature.

“I shall go and see how they are,” he mused, flicking a disgracefully inexperienced baby fly from his off leader’s ear with the end of his long four-in-hand whip. “Surely there can be no harm in that, I trust!” He smiled a little bitterly, and, gathering the ribbons more firmly into his hands, slowed down to take a difficult turning with his customary skill.

The river glittered bravely as he crossed the bridge, clothing itself all over with steel and silver when a fleecy little flock of cloudlets that had followed him from the “Arc-de-Triomphe” interposed their diaphanousness between him and the sun; but as soon as they had sailed on resuming its gallant armor of golden scales again; and when at last he reached the Noble Faubourg he found that the clouds had let themselves be distanced and that Spring reigned supreme.

Topping the garden walls of the Hôtel de Plenhöel the dainty trails of centenarian ivies were overtoned by the first shoots of snugly protected climbing rose-vines, that formed a triumphant garland of crimson-tipped green along the ancient granite coping.

With a curious beating of the heart Basil drove into the stone-paved courtyard and stopped his beautiful team of bays at the foot of the steps.

“Yes, Monsieur le Marquis and mademoiselle were within,” the Suisse admitted, with as near an approach to a welcoming smile as his dignified functions would allow (for Basil was cherished by inferiors, whether they belonged to his household or to those of other people), and with no decorum at all he ran into the hall, smiling gaily at that splendid official.

“How do you do?” he was calling a second later from the foot of the great stairs, where he stood beside the servant who had taken his coat. Holding lightly to the banisters, Marguerite was coming down almost at a run, and there was a freshness, a delicacy, a something pure and untouched about her, that made his heart, his very soul, warm with infinite tenderness. Contrary to her habit, she was not in white, but wore a linen frock of clear azure, and on her bright hair a floppy garden-hat woven of pliant straw, around which a wide loose-knotted bleu-de-ciel ribbon made her eyes bluer yet by sympathy.

“How are you, you rarity!” she cried, taking the two last steps at a bound and stretching out both hands to him.

The footman had disappeared, and, still holding his hands playfully, she drew him into a little salon opening straight from the hall.

“Sit down, monseigneur!” she laughed, pointing to an arm-chair beside the sofa, on the edge of which she settled herself like a bird, her fingers interlaced, her delicious head cocked on one side, sparrow-wise.

On a tabouret near by, and also between the two windows giving on the garden, stood big “buckets” of blue Sèvres, filled with blue hortensias—the exact blue of that negligently tied ribbon that seemed somehow to fascinate him. A ray of mote-laden sunshine gilded the Mazarine carpet about her tiny feet incased in silver-buckled white suède, and he smiled appreciatively.

“New shoes?” he queried, glancing down at them.

“Yes—isn’t that strange?” she smiled. “Old ones would scarcely suit this glorious weather. But how nice of you to come.... It has been an age....”

Her lips were smiling, but her eyes had an unusual under-depth of seriousness, and he came to earth rather flatly.

“Yes,” he said, brusquely, resuming the queer stiffness of attitude that had so deeply puzzled her when he had first adopted it. “It is quite a while since I came.” And for the second time he said, “How are you?”

“So-so,” she answered, all liveliness of tone and gesture momentarily eclipsed. “One is always so-so, is one not, in this good old Paris?”

“You should be far better than so-so, even here,” he stated, with astonishing severity, “you, whom the gods have showered with all blessings.”

“Have a cigarette!” she shrugged, pushing from beneath the hortensias a silver box and match-stand.

“No, thanks. I don’t care to smoke here. Your father says it oxidizes the ermines.”

“Papa? Nonsense! He never dreamt of caring for the ermines’ health. Besides, they are old enough to look after themselves. They are pretty, though!” she added, pointing to the heraldic ermines of Brittany embroidered in silver relief all over the pale satin of walls and hangings. “Pretty and antique,” she concluded, meditatively.

“Like most of your ideas,” he stated, leaning back and contemplating the intenseness of the hortensias.

She glanced at him between half-closed lashes, an imperceptible frown wrinkling her eyebrows.

“You find me too old-fashioned?” she questioned, drumming softly on the lid of the cigarette-box with the fingers of her left hand.

“N-no—yes. I don’t know; and, moreover, it’s none of my business.”

“None of your—business?” She stared. “None of your—” Her fingers abruptly ceased drumming, and she turned toward him a face of real bewilderment. “Aren’t we friends—relatives?”

He stirred uneasily, his eyes fixed on the carpet, as if desirous of counting the convolutions of its intricate pattern.

“Friends? Why, certainly friends! Of course ... we are friends! But what’s that got to do with it? You have other friends, and so—so have I, of course.”

Marguerite’s little ears were getting pink. What ailed the man, anyhow? Quick-tempered as she was soft-hearted, she felt oddly angry all at once.

“Other friends!” she exclaimed. “Friends like me? You mean to tell me that you have lots of friends like me?”

“Well,” Basil murmured, lamely, “not precisely like you. Nobody’s quite like you, but, nevertheless....”

“But—nothing at all!” she cried, truculently. “What has come over you lately, Basil Palitzin? You did not use to pose and posture in the old days. You were such a good comrade, such a trump. Tell me, what—is—the—matter—with—you?”

Again Basil twisted as if on pins and needles, twice he clasped and unclasped his hands, and the string of derogatory epithets he inwardly applied to himself would have made a trooper blush.

“You women are incredible,” he attempted to explain. “Young, old, or very young, you are all the same with your extraordinary imaginings. What should be the matter with me, pray? Do you notice any signs of incipient decrepitude?”

“I notice,” Marguerite cut in, “that you are changed, and in no way to your advantage, Cousin Basil. Once you used to be pleased at my liking you so much, but now you have become as repellant as possible. You pull faces a yard long; you are always in a bad humor, and if it were not so preposterous I would almost begin to think that you do not care for us any more, and that you have made up your mind to see as little of us as you decently can.”

“Oh, Innocence!” Basil thought, sadly. “Thank God she does not know what tortures she puts me through!” Aloud he said: “You are talking rank heresy, my dear Marguerite. Your father and—yourself are among those I am most attached to—you can never doubt that!”

“Thank you!” she scoffed, with a derisive inclination of her big floppy hat. “That’s kind of you to mention it en passant, but let me urge you to realize that you give no sign of it.”

“You cannot expect to have a monopoly of my affections!” muttered Basil, driven to desperation.

Marguerite bent forward and looked straight at him. “What did you say ... a monopoly?” Her voice was now very cool and nonchalant. Basil caught the look and his breath at one and the same time. Where had this child learned to speak like that? Atavism? The Marquise of the bird-suite at Plenhöel could not have done better if talking to the canaille at the foot of the guillotine; and not for the life of him could he utter a word in self-defense.

“A monopoly!” the “Gamin” repeated. “You use funny expressions sometimes, my cousin, and I must say that you amuse me very much.”

“You don’t amuse me!” he interposed, hotly. “I don’t know, moreover, why you take my words so greatly amiss. What I am trying to make you understand is that if I do not come here as—well, as often as I could wish, it is because I have other calls upon—er—my time; imperative demands upon—my attention. My duty—you understand, is to—”

She did not let him finish. “You are the best judge of your conduct and the employment of your time, and I regret having—twitted you about it. I am afraid it was very silly of me, but you see I am still very much the mere child you used to laugh with at Plenhöel. You may remember, perhaps, our last little encounter on that subject?”

She laughed, rose, and in a slightly constrained tone added: “Hadn’t you better go and see papa? He is at the top of the house, grubbing in the dust of a wonderful garret, full of delightful vieilleries, together with some workmen who are supposed to repair pipes, or leaders—I don’t exactly know which. Papa is extremely proud of his fifteenth-century garrets, let me tell you! One never knows where vanity is going to take root!”

Basil had risen slowly, and was gazing at her as she made her way to the bay leading through to the next salon, and his lips were not very steady when he spoke again:

“You are not angry, Marguerite?” This timidly, almost in a whisper. She turned back with a queer little laugh.

“Angry?” she asked. “Not a bit of it. It isn’t worth while. But hark you, Cousin Basil, don’t make any mistake. The ‘Gamin’ is a better friend of yours than you think. I may not yet be a young lady with grand manners. I am a good little chap, however—a tomboy, if you like; but try me if you ever need a real, genuine, bona-fide, faithful-to-the-end friend, and you’ll see!”

She pirouetted and, beckoning to him to follow, raced up the long flight of secondary stairs which led to the very roof.

Half-way to the top she suddenly paused on the threshold of a domed and glassed-in gallery that projected from the side of the house over the inclosed garden. It was filled with palms and plants and blossoming creepers, with here and there the fairy plume of a bamboo aspiring to the transparent curves above. The upper end of this miniature Vale of Kashmir was crossed by a broad span of almost invisible wire, behind which birds of a tropical splendor of feather flitted hither and yon. The liquid counterpart of this delightful unstill life was afforded by a long crystal panel revealing the musical spirt of a fountain, and a background of gorgeous aquatic plants, crisscrossed by the alert dartings of the prettiest collection of highly painted fishes possible to imagine. Moving jewels they seemed, as they quadrilled in the dear element of their birth, and not unhappy at all, as most aquarium-dwellers seem to be, for their perfect comfort had been studiously considered, and they appeared very much in love with existence as it was made for them there.

Basil had come to a standstill behind the ‘Gamin,’ and as she turned to speak he thought: “Her breath is as meadowsweet, her face like a flower, her hair was assuredly spun by elves, and her eyes—” Here comparison failed him, and with bent head he listened to the end of a sentence he had not been conscious of her beginning.

“—you might as well tell me, after all,” the low, dear voice was saying, and he looked helplessly at her.

“Didn’t you hear what I asked?” she petulantly exclaimed. “I am speaking plain French, am I not?”

Plain French! Could anything be plain that was connected with her?

“What were you asking?” he found himself forced to answer to those indignant eyes.

“Oh, you don’t even listen any more!” she reproached.

“I am an idiot!” he humbly confessed. “An idiot and a boor!”

Her soft, ringing laugh suddenly rippled out beneath the opulent foliage.

“My poor Basil!” she sympathized. “That’s what comes of being in love! Hortense Gervex used to tell me, when I was a baby, that Cupid is the silliest of all the gods, because he takes a malicious pleasure in stupefying all his subjects.”

“Comes from being in love?” Basil said, slowly. “Oh, of course that would be an explanation.”

“It is!” she triumphed. “Why, ever since you met Laurence you have been so different, so unlike your old self. Still, you should not carry your absence-of-mind too far; it is dreadfully impolite, you know.”

“I know,” he assented, apparently quite absorbed in the fantastic beauty of a bird-of-paradise blossom he had disengaged from amid its long, lance-like leaves.

“Well, if you know, and are properly contrite for your sins, do you mind if I now repeat my question?”

“Mind? Repeat it by all means, if you find me still worthy of the slightest attention.”

She had walked farther into the perfumed bower, and was now standing in the searching noonday light that was powerless to reveal a single flaw in her loveliness. She looked like one of the faintly-rose camellias on a near-by bush—surely made from the same cool velvet as her little face.

She inclined her head graciously—the “Gamin” was certainly growing up in the social amenities.

“You will not think me altogether indiscreet—I hope,” she questioned, in a suddenly crisp-cut voice he had never heard her use before, and there was a quaint little assumption of solicitude as she went on, “if I reask where you intend to spend the summer?”

Basil’s spirit was by this time in sad confusion, but he must answer her, and yet he could not bring himself to admit that it would be in a place far removed from their beloved haunts. An automatic second-self, doubtless summoned by the puzzling emergency, spoke for him.

“I think,” he said, slowly, “I might safely assert that I do not know as yet.”

She gave a light little laugh, and appeared to ponder for a moment.

“I”—there was the briefest suspension—“I am very glad you do not know as yet. Because it may turn out to be in Brittany!”

“That was a near thing,” Basil thought, drawing a profound but silent sigh of momentary relief.

“Still, are you quite sure that you do not know—as yet?” she resumed, taking a step in the direction of a sort of Dresden-china hod hanging between two pomegranate-bushes, that grew luxuriantly from old Spanish oil-jars of that green earthenware which makes one’s mouth water to look at, and plunging her hand into one of its cunningly devised compartments, extracted therefrom a little fistful of bird-seed.

“This is the pantry,” she explained, holding a fold of her skirt up to catch the surplus filtering through her fingers. “Would you like to feed them?”

“Whom?”

“Again?” she laughed. “Wool-gathering again! Why, naturally, I meant the elephants in the Jardin des Plantes. How did you fail to guess that?”

“I am sorry.... I was trying to solve ... a problem ... concerning the ... er ... social question.”

“Dear me! Poor old Basil! If you keep such lofty ideals always before you you’ll soon cease being a social success. Besides,” she glibly continued, “it is not in your line to ponder and reflect like a fuzzy old owl; you are a man of action, par excellence, and when one tries to force one’s talents one does nothing with grace.”

“Are you turning philosopher?” he tried to taunt her.

“Philosophy is becoming part of my day’s work,” she airily replied. “But now do look at Bolingbroke; he is awfully jealous!”

“Bolingbroke! May I be pardoned for hazarding another question? Who is Bolingbroke?”

Marguerite looked at Basil, and again her glance held a subtle mixture of mirth and gravity.

“You—as I remarked before—are getting into the sad habit of forgetting your most faithful friends and honest admirers. Why this is Bolingbroke!” And she pointed with an upward toss of her obstinate little chin to a gilded swing whereon reposed, in magnificent dignity, a great white cockatoo, crested and tailed with brilliant orange. Some subterranean disturbance was agitating his snowy breast feathers, and his round eyes, dilated with greed, watched Marguerite’s every move as she fed the lesser luminaries below.

“Oh, you wretched usurper!” She addressed him grandiloquently. “This form of food would neither suit nor please you, and yet you covet it! Isn’t that very human?” she tragically demanded of Basil, who had at last managed to summon an apology for a laugh to his assistance. “Remind yourself,” she went on flippantly, “that, unlike some others of his kind, he cannot express his desires by word of beak. Repressed inclinations are hard to bear, but the impossibility of ever giving them voice, excepting by shrieks of distress, must be awful indeed!”

Basil was watching her intently, trying in vain to discover whether she was quite as joyful as she seemed.

“Would you oblige me by making a long arm—you are so agreeably tall—and presenting this token of our joint regard to yonder regicide?” she resumed, indicating a majolica wooden shoe on a table close by. “No, not the whole thing; one of the therein-contained biscuits ... please!”

And while complying with her request Basil was thinking, thinking, thinking! “What a coward I am! Why not tell her the truth? What’s the use of shirking the task because it hurts me to do the right thing? And what would she really care, this heavenly baby, with her toys, her exquisite amusements, her deadly simplicity? She will not miss me a moment of all those years to come.”

“Poverino!” Marguerite was meanwhile apostrophizing the ill-tempered bird. “Here, you! Accept this offering gently if you can. It is well meant, and the biscuit is good and sweet! Mille grazie, eccellenze,” she added to Basil. “I am in an Italian mood to-day, as you may perceive. This gracious retreat looks Italian, I think; so do the camellias, and the blue sky over our crystalline dome; so do these little pet vassals of mine; feeding from the hand, as all properly self-respecting vassals should do.”

She tossed the rest of her fistful of seeds to the Bengalis, the gold and green finches, the slim Holland canaries, the redcaps, and twenty other chiefs of tribe whirling around on the sanded floor of their palatial abode to snatch the tempting breakfast from one another.

“They are human,” he harshly commented while following their airy gyrations, “hence quarrelsome and envious, just like Bolingbroke. Too bad that such innocent-looking creatures should have such beastly faults!”

Marguerite seemed suddenly troubled. “Why are you bitter even about trifles?” she queried. “Is that yet another departure from the old state of affairs?”

“Perhaps,” he replied, in a tone that strove in vain to be light. “I must be unlearning fast the art of life as it should be lived. I suppose that with the years one passes from disenchantment to disenchantment. Isn’t that the rule of all down-slope walkers?”

With a quick intake of breath Marguerite swung round toward him, and his heart contracted horribly as he saw that her eyes were wet.

“There is something amiss,” she whispered, bending ever so slightly forward, and stretching her little palms downward as if in swift renunciation of all that she had ever held. “There is something. I knew it. I felt it.... Tell me, Basil ... tell me!”

He had not bargained for this, and he was now dully doubting his own ears. Could this be Marguerite speaking?

“Something amiss?” he repeated after her with would-be emphasis. “Oh, now look here, my dear child, be reasonable, please, and do cease to imagine that I am trying to conceal some catastrophe from you.”

But Marguerite would no longer accept equivocation of any sort.

“Reasonable?” she said, more calmly. “I am reasonable enough—at least for my age. And if you only reflect you will admit that I have some small reason to ask what I do—some infinitesimal right, as a friend, if you prefer it so.”

“Oh yes—she too has rights!” flashed keenly through his mind. “And better ones than any other human being, if she but knew it.” “Certainly,” he said aloud, “you have all possible rights as my friend—as any of my friends have—to know what concerns me; but there is nothing—nothing worth telling, I assure you.”

“Nothing?” she exclaimed. “When you are as dull as ditch-water—when you seem as blue as—” Her eyes went to the transparent vaulting scarcely veiling the sky, as if searching for a fitting comparison, and he grasped at his last chance of repairing his previous mistake.

“I am blue, and a little sad; perhaps you are right.” He hesitated. “Just as any one else would be who contemplates a certain change in existing circumstances.”

She was looking at him steadily, unswervingly, waitingly.

“When I told you a little while ago that I didn’t know as yet exactly where I would spend the summer, I was speaking the truth. As a matter of fact, I do not know yet exactly where, but it will be somewhere in Russia, probably at Tverna, and just ... on account of this indecision on my part I was afraid you’d laugh at me as you so often do!”

“The Russian conception of what is laughable differs by the whole span of heaven from mine,” she said, with suspicious quietness. “The point of interest is, however, whether you are going there a-Maying in the mud, or ... whether ... well, whether you will be gone long.... I mean after the Maying and the summering are both done with.”

Reassured by her deceiving calm, he thought himself clever to seize the moment when truth might be quite truthfully conveyed.

“That depends upon so many circumstances,” he explained. “It is impossible to be precise, but I should say ... yes, I should certainly say that it may take ... er ... a year, or even more, to bring matters requiring my presence at home to a satisfactory conclusion.”

Her pitiful little face had slowly whitened as he spoke, and suddenly he felt her fingers desperately clutching his arm.

“A year or more ... oh! what shall I do without—!”

The rest was strangled by a will-power fifty years older than herself. But for a second she stood shaking from head to foot, trying vainly to master feelings too complex and difficult for her young soul to understand; and he—well, he remained frozen to his place, not daring to move, to say a word; absolutely terrified for the first time in his brave, straight life.

From his high perch Bolingbroke watched the scene, half of his biscuit still held firmly in one sharp claw, his brilliant head inclined to one side critically, cynically—one would have sworn. “What fools these mortals be!” he seemed to say, and doubtless to create a diversion he dropped the remainder of his tidbit upon Basil’s shoulder, and burst into a demoniacal yell, like that of a Comanche Indian on the war-path.

The “Gamin” gave a little laugh so queer that it made its hearer ready to cry, and she let go of his arm. “You wicked old witch-bird!” she scolded. “What a fright you gave me!”

“He is a bit startling!” Basil assented, endeavoring to get control of his voice.

“Yes, he makes one’s head ache,” she corroborated. “But just think of it! Poor papa is still in the dust. Let’s go and sweep the cobwebs off him. He must be covered with them!”

She made a swift move toward the flower-gallery’s jessamine-draped doorway, and paused, holding lightly to a drooping branch.

“By the way,” she said, over her shoulder, “when do you go?”

“When do I—go? In a few days, but ... I’ll certainly come and say farewell before I do,” he lamely replied.

“Thanks so much! Yes, I think it will be right to remember us on such an occasion. Papa is so very punctilious about matters of etiquette, you know!”

She again gave that queer little laugh that dismayed him, and disappeared into the hall.

“Marguerite!” he called, hurriedly. “Next time it will be official, and I will not be alone. Can’t you say au revoir properly now?” He knew he should not have said that as soon as he had done so.

Counting her steps mechanically, she came back, and here at last was the doorway within which he stood. Sweet and serene she reached his side. A little color had come back to her face.

“Of course I can,” she assented. “Au revoir, Cousin Basil! Au revoir and good-luck to you!”

Could he stand much more of this? His handsome features looked suddenly wooden beneath their extreme pallor, but she was no longer looking at him. For the fraction of a second he hesitated. Could he venture to take her in his arms, just this once, like a child one has known and cherished all one’s life? A shiver ran all over him. The pause had been too short to attract her notice, but it had served its turn. Summoning to his aid his last remnants of self-respect, he held out both his hands, in which she put her own.

“Au revoir, and God keep you in His care!” he said, very low; then, hastily, almost brusquely, he pressed his lips into the rosy hollow of each little palm and dropped them.

“God bless you and keep you,” she whispered, and, turning quickly on her pointed heels, she preceded him up-stairs to the dusty regions where “Antinoüs” was so usefully occupied.

CHAPTER X

There be twin crowns, whose kingly dower
Forbids to fail or swerve,
Borne by twin angels, Love and Power,
And writ thereon, “I serve.”

“Ah, yes, Princess, I pity you with all my heart! Imagine hiding your charm, your beauty, in a prison like Tverna—excuse me, Basil-Vassilièvitch—but you know that Tverna, magnificent though it be, is a prison nine months out of the year ... a grand prison, I admit, but still a jail—a place to distract one with its loneliness.”

Countess Chouróff, sitting bolt upright in her chair of state, was heading her hospitable table in a dazzling haze of jewels that outlined her meager person at every edge.

“She reminds me of a wire sign illuminated by electricity,” thought Basil, who sat on her right hand.

“You are very severe, Vassilissa-Andrièvna, very severe indeed, to my birthplace!” he said, smiling.

“Severe! Hear this miscreant talk!” she appealed to the company, nodding a tiaraed coiffure until the gigantic diamonds and emeralds spiking it in every direction flashed again. “But men are like that ... they do not understand our tenderer natures. My poor husband was identically the same—God rest his soul!” She crossed herself scrupulously with a bony yellow hand loaded with enormous gems. “Duty was his eternal rallying-cry—bless him! It was our duty to vegetate in the wilds at his side until it became imperative for our daughters to be presented, and then the grumbles, the lamentations that ensued! Dear! Dear! One would have sworn he was on his way to be crucified. I assure you, Princess, that if you yield at the beginning to marital tyranny you will never again be able to call your soul your own.”

Laurence, in all the panoply of a great mondaine at a feast given in her honor, was somehow or other entirely out of it. This was something never dreamt of before: a dinner at one of the most ancient houses of a far-off Russian province, carried out with the pompous ceremonial and curious discomforts of past days, in a banqueting-hall spacious enough to shelter an army and evidently open to all the winds of heaven. It was raining heavily outside, with no promise of better things to come, and from her place she could see files of servants in full livery running to and fro from the kitchen—built à la mode d’il-y-a longtemps, in the middle of the inner court—bearing covered silver dishes, all adrip with the diluvian downpour. The majordomo, stiff as a ramrod, advanced as far as the edge of the glass marquise every five minutes or so, to convey his orders in a withering autocratic voice which grew sweet as honey the minute he re-entered the banqueting-hall, and the four butlers in attendance marched and countermarched with the omnipresent lacqueys, all attired in the Chouróff scarlet and gold, like captains heading small detachments of troops. What manner of country was this?

Another surprising anachronism—at least so it appeared to her—was the fact that albeit this was an occasion when, to use the French simile, the little dishes had been rammed into the big ones (les petits plats dans les grands), yet the feudal custom of “guests below the salt” was strictly adhered to. Indeed, the implacable etiquette of the House of Chouróff separated the festive board into two exact parts, one reserved for ceremoniously invited gentlemen and ladies, the other for the poor relatives, the hangers-on, and the household proper—comprising tutors, governesses, the Polish land-steward, a host of lady companions, another of penniless noble damsels awaiting the Countess’s good pleasure to obtain a small “dot” from her generosity, the almoner, the medical officer of the district, and other functionaries of similar importance.

“What an idea!” Laurence reflected. “What extravagant barbarism and outlandishness! How they would laugh at home if they saw this.” Laugh she did not, however. She was impressed, in spite of her silent disapproval, and a little frightened, too. This masterful woman in claret-hued velvet, who led her people with something like a field-marshal’s bâton, and managed, however, to inspire them with a curious mixture of passionate devotion and abject terror, remained a mysterious and awesome power to her. Also Countess Chouróff was by no means dazzled by her, Laurence’s, high rank and fortune, for she was absurdly wealthy herself, and a very great lady, notwithstanding her oddities and extravagances of speech; a personage of weight and power in the land such as Laurence could never hope to be, and one with whom the new-comer could not, as she had done with almost everybody elsewhere, pose and posture, which, of course, vexed the bride not a little.

“You can never realize,” Madame Chouróff was saying now, “what a trip to Petersburg meant then, Princess! Oh, it was a voyage indeed! We looked like a veritable Noah’s ark procession, let me tell you, setting off from here after the snow began to bear. Berlines swung on runners, and kibitkas and fourgons—preceded by couriers on horseback or in light wagons—tèlégas—and what not? A noise, a clamor, when getting under way, of which you can have no conception! Of course we had to carry with us half of the batterie de cuisine—how else would we have fared on the road?—and the chef with his scullions, his silver saucepans! How he would swear over the portable stoves to be used en route, at the miserable post-houses!” She laughed heartily, creating thereby a veritable pyrotechnic commotion with her jewels.

“I remember once when we were snowed in, stuck fast between two stations—post-stations, you understand—flakes as big as swans’ wings falling, falling, falling in a dense curtain. Four of my children were almost infants then, eight and nine years old, I think. Let me see, was it the twins?... I can’t remember; perhaps Zina and Dimitri, Nikola and Sônitzkà; it does not matter, however. Anyhow, they were asleep in their father’s traveling-carriage, at full length, so that he had to get out and join me and the girls—four of them, mind you—that made six of us pressed together like sardines, eating on our laps from the provision-baskets, and swallowing red-hot tea brewed by the chief of our kitchens beneath a lean-to of pine branches in the very throat of the tempest. Behind the berline the maid’s rumble was getting full of snow. It was droll! You must understand the berline was honeycombed with drawers and receptacles, and there were supplementary sacks of leather attached everywhere. As to my ‘sleeper,’ it did not boast so many appendages and cachettes; it was much lighter, and lined with—what do you think?—with rose-colored satin—a conceit of my poor husband. It had served us on our honeymoon. And that night he was in a vile humor, thanks to the fact that for the first time in his existence he had been deprived of his indispensable rastigaï—marrow-filled patés—since you do not know Russian, Princess. Oh, but we had ices!... Don’t laugh, Basil-Vassilièvitch! That cook was a pearl, and with the aid of essences of various fruits and powdered nuts, of which he always took a quantity along, he manufactured a sort of Nesselrode in little moulds. Delicious they were, too, but they did not appease my poor husband’s wrath concerning those rastigaï. He told the butler some impatient things when he brought the Nesselrode shapes on a frozen tray, and repented afterward, for he was consummately golden-hearted. I recall that he gave him ten rubles—gold—the next morning. We left the berline to the girls after that, and took refuge, he and I, in my ‘sleeper.’ He became quite too amiable then, poor fellow, also he was very handsome, an all-conquering mustache—a leg!—men wore knee-breeches still—but I was adamant. I had to punish him for his previous evil mood, and so I threatened to send him to sleep in the cook’s shelter. Ah, the days of our youth ... how often we regret them!”

Laurence’s amazement knew no bounds when she heard the bursts of laughter that followed at her end of the table—echoed pianissimo by those below the salt. All this was hardly decent, she thought, for she had a singular fund of prudishness concealed far down below many other more agreeable defects. This old woman, with her angular shoulders, her corded neck and parchmented skin, seemed to her own youth positively odious as she sat enthroned there, flying her arms and bewailing her lost opportunities. She wondered at Basil, who seemed quite touched, and patted almost filially one of the flat wrists, crowded to the elbow with porte-bonheurs, that reposed for a fleeting second on the cloth beside him. To Laurence the deeps of those wonderful sapphire eyes that had been always the Countess’s sole but very potent beauty, and were still so infinitely expressive and youthful, said nothing at all, although they were just now not quite free from a certain telltale moisture. “An old absurdity,” she called the great lady in her own mind, and, like the Nesselrode tray of the defunct Count, she froze up through and through, becoming with every new experience more hostile to the foreign atmosphere surrounding her.

The farther she penetrated into the heart of Russia the less she comprehended or liked her new country. Indeed, slowly but surely a sort of abhorrence for everything pertaining to it was rising within her; and her hard face and unsympathetic expression made one young officer on leave murmur to another young officer on leave, who sat beside him at table that night: “I say, Voïnóff, Palitzin’s efforts to marry a foreigner are all in vain. He’s caught a Tartar, after all!”

The other, whose uniform glittered like sunshine, and whose name was the vernacular for “Warrior,” was blessed with one of those meek faces that are greatly confirmed in that expression by sleek, butter-hued hair rigidly parted all the way down the middle, as was his. Also he had a habit of blushing all over his scalp, which made him resemble for minutes at a time what the Italians frivolously call un piccolo porcellino. He indulged in one of these manifestations at his comrade’s words, adding thereto a smothered squeal of delight, which completed the likeness very neatly.

“I catch you laughing at me, Yégor-Alexandréitch!” Countess Chouróff called out to him. “You think my little stories are not befitting this noble assemblage!”

“It ... it is Zakbarièf!” choked the youth, getting pinker and pinker under his pale, silky thatch. “He is so funny!”

Zakbarièf tried to protest, but vainly, for Madame Chouróff had already launched herself into another anecdote, and he relapsed into silence, bestowing dagger-like looks upon his grinning brother-at-arms.

Dessert was approaching, heralded by turreted confections, reminding one involuntarily of the glorious ice palace that every winter is built on the Neva; by pyramids of sweet cakes and transparent edifices of jelly which it took two men to carry. According to Russian fashion, the fruit and bonbons and minor toothsomenesses had had their place on the cloth from the beginning of dinner, cincturing with their appetizing battalions the masses of flowers and feathery foliage forming the center and wings of that opulent display. Lucullus dining with Lucullus could have devised nothing more truly complete.

“You are bored, madame? You think our agapes too ostentatious?” The question was asked by Laurence’s left-hand neighbor, whom it must be admitted she, in her fault-finding and sulky mood, had absolutely neglected, as she had also her right-hand one, who, by the way, was a corpulent Chouróff, more interested in his plate than in pretty women. To be sure, when the general presentations had been gone through she had not heard either name, and, as if perversely inclined, the little dinner-cards inscribed with them had lain prone on their faces between her cover and theirs. Yet the speaker was not a man to be easily overlooked. Tall, slender, without being in the least thin, he had the most interesting face imaginable: a delicately aquiline face, barred by a long, slender mustache inclining to a light frost of grayness, which was repeated in his thick, short-cut hair. Deep under well-marked brows were what could well have been called, after the fashion of lady-novelists, “eagle’s eyes,” so penetrating were they, and he wore his dress-coat like a hauberk—a soldier every inch of him, if out of uniform—a Grand Seigneur of olden times in modern mufti.

“Not precisely bored,” drawled Laurence, turning languidly toward him. “But a little surprised at what I see. Surely, monsieur, you are not a Russian?”

“I am not, madame, and sometimes I regret it, for they are a great people over here.”

“Think so?”

“Yes, madame, I do, from the bottom of my heart, else I would not have married my wife.”

The taunt did not pierce Laurence’s thick vanity and self-righteousness.

“You are wedded to a Russian?” she asked du bout des lèvres.

“I am afraid you did not catch my name a while ago, madame. As a matter of fact, I have the honor of being closely related to you—by marriage. I am Salvières.”

“The Duke!” Laurence exclaimed, with sudden attention, and with the same animation she had displayed when the “Gamin” had mentioned Salvières to her at Plenhöel; for he was a very great personage indeed, even to Laurence’s colossal ignorance of the intimate lining of affairs, both social and diplomatic.

He smiled amusedly. “The Duke!” he said. “Why, yes, I suppose I can call myself one of the unfortunates so hampered, although why you flatteringly emphasized the article I can’t imagine. A greater distinction is mine, as being now your brother-in-law, very much at your service, belle petite madame!”

“But where is your wife?”

“Alas! at home, where an incredible variety of occupations detains her.”

“What do you call ‘at home’ when you are here?” she asked. “Madame de Salvières has pretty nearly as many estates as Basil.”

Salvières laughed. He had a charming laugh, disclosing beautifully regular teeth. “My dear wife’s castle of Palitzinovna—a prolongation of Tverna, so to speak. We are very fond of it.”

“How can you, the owner of Salvières, bear to abide in Russia?” Laurence insisted, with deplorable bad taste.

“Decidedly you do not like the White Empire!” he said. “May I be allowed to give you a small paternal hint, which is, do not let Basil notice this too much, or Tatiana, either. She is quick as a flash of lightning, is my blonde beloved, and would resent such heresy, even more than her brother would.”

“Heresy! I cannot believe that you mean what you say. I hate Russia, and I don’t mind who knows it, Monsieur de Salvières.”

“My name, dear madame, to family and friends is Jean—one of Biblical simplicity and easy to remember. May I venture to hope that you will in future deign to use it? Moreover, my character, undistinguished though it be by any startling virtues, is simple also, and I always mean what I say, even if I do not always consider it a duty to say all I mean. That is why I spoke of heresy just now. Your new country is delightful, as you will speedily find out for yourself.”

“You really like Russia, then?” she questioned, helping herself mechanically to peach-ice. “Yes, Cyprus,” she said to the footman behind her.

“I do, very, very much; and so will you when you know it better, I assure you. It is an attaching land, peopled by splendid races, one and all; a place of great deeds, of courageous lives, of extraordinary intellects, talents, and more than talents—achievements. The mujiks, I think, are unique in their brave placidity; but they are fighters, too, and mighty good ones, when occasion requires. Look at what Skobèléff could do with them! The nobles are by no means the profligate gamblers and feather-brained spendthrifts they are often supposed to be, but large-hearted gentlemen, devoted to their very arduous duties; and as to the women, rich or poor, patrician, peasant, or bourgeois—you must pardon me if I find it difficult to find words adequate to translate my opinion of them, for they are more than women; companions in the true sense of the word, comrades, counselors—and precious ones at that!”

“This is sheer enthusiasm! How long have you felt all this? Since your marriage?”

Salvières smiled. “No,” he said, softly, “ever since as a lad I came to visit Basil’s grandmother at Tverna—years ago. She was the most exquisite creature one could imagine. Lovely, clever, able, wise, sweet as a flower, and so comprehending, so full of mercy and charity; the courage and spirit of a knight—perfection! Indeed, her personal magnetism and charm were so great that every man who approached her fell in love with her. And how gracefully she used to transform them into lifelong friends! Physically she was a wonder: little hands and feet that were a sculptor’s dream, an oval face lighted by violet eyes—yes, violet as the petals of deep larkspur; a mass of undulating hair—white as nacre at thirty, and almost as iridescent, it was so bright—and a poise, a maintien. I could become lyrical when I think of that exquisite woman, whom no one has ever quite resembled, excepting, perhaps, Marguerite de Plenhöel. Strangely enough, later on the ‘Gamin’ will assuredly be a second Véra Petrovna Chemensky. Qualities, manners, virtues, and talents are the same already, and even as she is now she always reminds me strongly of her.”

Laurence was looking wide-eyed at him. Was Marguerite de Plenhöel going to pursue her even here? Extremely vexed, she curtly retorted:

“You are lyrical enough, I assure you, to suit any taste, even the famous ‘Gamin’s’!”

Salvières twirled the ends of his mustache with a familiar gesture. He felt annoyed, not only on account of the slighting reference to Marguerite, not only because he was not accustomed to be spoken to in that peevish manner, but because he was becoming aware of a decided sense of disquiet concerning Basil’s future happiness—Basil, who was as near and dear to him as if he had been his blood brother. Jean de Salvières had not expected to find in the twenty-year-old bride of his brother-in-law—who had been described to him as a well-born beauty—so pert and altogether uninhabitable a nature. Beautiful she certainly was—of that there could not be the faintest doubt—but her self-assertion, her cutting way of saying things, and her lack of punctilio, did not impress him as befitting so young a woman, and once again he tugged impatiently at his mustache. He was too frank to attempt playing her at the end of a line with the cunning and savoir-faire of an angler (although this would have been easy enough to him) in order to pry more deeply into her character. Moreover, she repelled him. If he liked a person he showed it at once; if he disliked one, he made a point of having nothing more to do with him or with her; but here was a problem not soluble by either plan; for he could neither ignore her nor cast her aside, owing to many reasons, chief among which was the dawning conviction that in Basil’s interest it would be well if he followed up Laurence a little, helped her if he could, advised her, certainly.

He and his wife had been in India on a pleasure trip at the time of the marriage, and his surprise at what he now discovered was painful.

“The famous ‘Gamin’!” he said, speculatively. “Why famous? Has that dear little thing rendered herself guilty of any more heroic deeds since I last had the happiness of seeing her?”

“Heroic deeds? I was not aware she dealt in that sort of thing!” said Laurence, who for so lofty a soul was now within measurable distance of snappishness, and she looked at Salvières with a severity indicative of an intention to keep him strictly in his place. Yet had she taken the trouble to do so, she might have realized that she sat in the presence of that rare and indefinable creation—a strong man, whom no feminine trickery could find at any moment off his guard.

“I beg your pardon,” he quietly replied. “She frequently, on the contrary, deals in such things. Only a few months ago she jumped into the sea from a high rock—a very high rock, understand—to save from drowning a silly gawk of a ship’s boy. Half a gale was blowing at the time, and it was something more than a man’s ordinary risk for her to take.”

Laurence’s eyelids fluttered, but she did not actually raise her eyes to the uncomfortable neighbor whose simple directness of speech found no favor in her sight.

“Really!” she remarked. “I never heard of it!”

“It is your loss then, madame, and I am glad to have been so fortunate as to repair this lack of knowledge on your part.”

She made a grimace expressive of real annoyance. “I am not much of a gossip,” she shrugged, “and therefore never greatly given to listen to it.”

“That being the case,” retorted Salvières, “we may remain hopeful that this will go no further. Good actions are best left out of general conversation, excepting in such particular cases as this one. They are so seldom credited.” [“Why in the world does she hate the ‘Gamin’?” he was asking himself. “What has the poor child done to her?”]

“You seem very fond of Marguerite de Plenhöel?” Laurence remarked. “Everybody I know appears to have some weakness or other for her, and yet she is really nothing extraordinary!”

“Perhaps that might explain it,” he said. “You see, she is simplicity itself, without pose of any sort, but also very bright and clever; also she is gay and brave—Heaven help her!”

“If she is all that, why should Heaven need to interfere?”

Salvières was again thoughtfully twisting his mustache, Decidedly this new relative of his was not improving on better acquaintance. Unhappy Basil! When the scales—thick as window-shutters he was forced to believe—fell from his eyes, what would he do?

“Heaven,” he said, slowly, “must always interfere with its own, although God forbid that I should attempt to explain to you the ways of Providence.”

“You evidently consider Marguerite an angel, then?” Laurence queried, in an odd voice.

“Oh, by no means! She has faults, great faults, not the least of them being her over-confidence in others.”

“You know her very well, I suppose?”

“As well as one knows a creature one has carried about in one’s arms before it could walk,” he acquiesced.

“As long as that? I heard that you were personally related to her, but not very closely.”

“She is my niece, à la mode de Bretagne par alliance,” he explained.

“Oh, that accounts for your enthusiasm, I suppose,” Laurence proposed, with a pale smile. “One is apt to be more or less proud of what belongs to one, whether par alliance or otherwise.”

“Not always!” he vigorously rejoined. “Ah! Sapristi! Not always, I assure you! (Can she be stupid into the bargain?” he mused. “That would be a superfetation of calamities!”) And as Countess Chouróff was rising, he pushed back his chair and drew Laurence’s out of the way of her train, while she moved at his side with that subtle rustle of superfine silken linings that conveys even to the dullest masculine mind an especial care for dress and the wisdom of dealing with a great couturier.

In any other case, Salvières could in all probability have dismissed from his mind the thoroughly disagreeable quarter of an hour he had just passed, but this was impossible for him to do. His keen eyes unrolled before him a long and dark array of eminently unpleasant possibilities, not concerning him or his wife, precisely, and yet liable to make things a bit dreary for both of them.

“How do you like her?”

The question took him by surprise as he was escaping from the concert-room, to which the Countess’s guests were being marshaled, and, turning quickly, he found his brother-in-law at his elbow.

“Like whom?” he demanded, eager to gain time.

“Why, my wife, of course!” Basil answered. “I saw you chatting nineteen to the dozen with her, until the end of the Pantagruelian feast Madame Chouróff euphemistically calls a simple little dinner.”

“She is remarkably beautiful,” Salvières sincerely approved. “Indeed, I find that the portraits you sent us were far from doing her justice.”

Curiously enough, this time Basil did not flush with gratification, as when Régis de Plenhöel had been the appraiser; instead, an almost worried expression overcast his features.

“Come here, Jean!” he said, drawing Salvières into the billiard-room, which was entirely unoccupied at the moment, and both men seated themselves upon a broad, mellow divan far away from the central hanging-lamps.

“I don’t wish,” Basil said at once, “simply to know how you like Laurence’s looks—that is not necessary. I am anxious—very anxious to hear what else you have to say about her. Between you and me there has always existed a sympathy and a comprehension greater than ordinary camaraderie, and that is why I don’t scruple to question you as I do. What do you think of Laurence, and what do you think Tatiana will think of her—which,” he concluded, “makes many ‘thinks’ in one request.”

“Plain speaking and clear understanding. An exchange without robbery! Eh?”

“Exactly!”

“Humm ... m! I wonder if in this all-blessed corner I could venture to light my pipe?” And Salvières peeped cautiously round the open panel of the door. “There’s nobody about, as far as I can see,” he laughed, “and you know that I do not consider digestion perfect without a few whiffs of my trusty briar.” He was watching Basil covertly as he spoke, and was somewhat relieved to see the strained expression of his eyes relax a little.

“I know. You’re lucky that Tatiana does not object to such a pernicious habit,” he interposed; “but there is nothing to ‘oxidize’ here, fortunately.”

“Your sister,” the Duke averred, “is too fine a woman to object to anything I fancy. She’s true blue, like all the Palitzins. But what’s that you were saying about oxidizing?”

“Nothing! Nothing! I was thinking of something else,” Basil hastily rejoined, repressing his untimely flash of memory, as he continually repressed similar ones. “Light your pipe first, and answer my question as soon as you have satisfied your brutal instincts,” he concluded, with a praiseworthy effort at banter.

“Your question? Oh! Yes, of course!” dallied Salvières. “Well, it is not possible for me to give you a very complete opinion after ten minutes’ conversation with a lovely woman, my dear Basil. It is too large an order for yours truly.”

He gave a wave of the hand descriptive of intricate complexities ad infinitum, and, deliberately leaning back on the luxurious cushions of the divan, began to puff at his trusty briar.

“Nevertheless,” Basil said, frowning, “if you had something agreeable to say, you wouldn’t need half a dozen personal interviews to do so. It is first impressions that count.”

“Not a bit of it!” Salvières contradicted. “Were you to ask my opinion of a passer-by—Lord, I hope there is nobody around”—he interrupted himself, glancing at his pipe with mock apprehension—“I would satisfy your curiosity at once; but when it comes to passing judgment upon so considerable a personage as the Princess Basil Palitzin, my sister-in-law and your wife, words become momentous; although this does not exclude my assuring you that I found her interesting beyond all expression!”

Basil, who was smoking a cigarette—a dainty Russian affair all white and gold, and long, hard mouthpiece—brusquely threw it into an ash-tray.

“I am glad you found her interesting,” he put in, with averted eyes, “but there are a good many ways of being interesting. Why don’t you speak out? Surely it is natural for me to ask you how you like my wife!”

Salvières sat suddenly up, drew his long legs under him tailor fashion, and stared at his friend and brother, rocking softly backward and forward as he did so.

“My dear boy,” he said at last, “of course it is natural, but I cannot understand why you seem so worried about my opinion. I have just told you that I find your wife both surpassingly beautiful and extremely interesting. What more can I say à première vue?”

Basil took a fresh cigarette, lighted it from the still burning stump on the tray, and gazed for a moment at the ends of his pumps, as though noticing something amiss with those irreproachable articles of footwear.

“Do you think,” he suddenly asked, with apparent irrelevance, “that perhaps I did a foolish, an unwise, or even a cruel thing in separating her from her friends, her country, her pleasures, and in bringing her to live at Tverna?”

“A woman shall forsake her family, her land, and her own surroundings, to cleave to her husband, quoth Holy Scripture!” Salvières pronounced, severely.

“It does nothing of the kind! It is the other way about. It is the husband who is particularly mentioned,” Basil contradicted, unable to repress a smile.

“Oh! It works both ways undoubtedly! Behold me, who spend neatly the half of every year over here. Besides, not being me, or an Irishman, I presume it isn’t your intention to become an absentee landlord?”

“No, naturally not, but I do not think Laurence likes Russia. She does not complain, you understand, but I cannot help noticing—”

“I believe you, my boy,” commented Salvières, inwardly. And then as the pause threatened to draw to an embarrassing length, he quietly remarked: “She’ll get used to the change after a while, never fear. Women are eminently adaptable, and, given the merely nominal duties she will encounter, and the enormous advantages that will counterbalance these, you ought not to worry yourself about the result!”

“But that is just the devil of it!” Basil exclaimed. “She does not understand those duties you are pleased to call nominal, but are as a matter of fact very serious. She’s afraid—I honestly believe—of the people! You see, she has heard all her life in England that we Russians are a bloodthirsty, violent race, capable of any evil; so what will you? Poor child, the isolation, perhaps even the ‘grandeur’ of her new position, are weighing upon her!”

“Nonsense! Who’s afraid?” Salvières said, with some irritation. “She, the daughter of a line of sailors and soldiers, the granddaughter of that old fire-eater, Admiral Seton, the ‘Orror of the Horient—as they nicknamed him at Alexandria! Bah! Try and make some one else believe that!”

“Physically afraid, of course not! Morally afraid, yes!” asserted Basil, straightening himself. “We are having some little trouble over at Tverna just now, as you know; a mere trifle not worthy of serious consideration; but, strangely enough, it makes her nervous. She has not caught on since our arrival there. Imagine, she considered it quite improper when old General Hiltròw knelt on the threshold of the drawing-room and kissed her hands in greeting, awaiting the kiss on the brow that is customary here, though I had warned her of all these things. The people all and sundry were ready enough to prostrate themselves at her feet, but”—he hesitated, cleared his throat, and glanced appealingly at his relative—“but,” he continued, seeing Salvières raise his shoulders ever so slightly, “but she drew away from them—no, I don’t quite mean that—rather she showed her—her indifference—a little too plainly. For instance, she takes no interest in the sick, the ailing, the unhappy; she never sets foot in an isba; she has handed over the key of the pharmacy to the housekeeper, a thing never heard of in mother’s time; and when the land-steward or the staròstá come in quest of remedies, delicacies, or any of the many comforts we always provide, she sends them word that she does not know what they want—which is true enough, of course—and that they must not bother her.”

“You should teach her to do better!” Salvières hazarded.

“But—my dear fellow,” Basil began, “I am not inclined to make her life here a misery.”

“Then don’t complain,” was the cool rejoinder. “Let her have her head; bid her amuse herself in her own way, encourage her to see and receive people of her own choice, and thereby obtain peace—that most desirable of possessions!”

“It is not everybody’s privilege, after all, to know by instinct how to treat the lower classes,” Basil said, irritably, “or to become popular, and to find the secret of assuring a number of unprepossessing and almost total strangers that one remembers them individually and perfectly!”

“Yet that is just what we must do, if we seek popularity. Besides which popularity means—plus a cruel strain on the digestive organs—a deep pocket—which your wife fortunately has—and the patience of an archangel—although Archangel Michael does not give the impression of extreme longanimity. Neither does your wife, if I judge her aright.”

“There’s no earthly use in joking, Jean! Try and help me, rather, for, to tell you the truth, I’m a little at a loss what to do. If I yield to her unspoken wishes, and take her away, it means utter ruin to all my plans, my projects, and also to the welfare of my people. And if I do not yield—”

“Don’t yield on that point, Basil!” Salvières quickly interrupted. “Don’t take her away. It won’t do. No, certainly not; it won’t do, for her, for you, or for them.”

“I know; I feel just as you do about it, but what then?”

Salvières gave a sharp sigh, then he laughed; but his laugh was not easy, and at last he spread out both arms in a gesture almost of discouragement.

“You are letting yourself be driven into an impasse, my dear Basil,” he said, gravely. “A very dangerous proceeding. You ask me to help you. You know that I’m only too ready to do so. But how the deuce am I to get about it? Let me see. How long have you been at Tverna now?”

“A little over two months.”

“That all! Well, you surely did not expect a mondaine like your wife to get accustomed to your citadel in so short a time. Still, what do you say to Tatiana and myself coming to stay for a couple of weeks or so with you? Tatiana is the most capable manager ever created for the joy of this world, and her advice might work wonders. She is to the manner born, and I think she wouldn’t mind teaching your beautiful Laurence how to go about it on an estate as large and difficult to rule as a whole province.”

Basil turned upon Salvières a pair of rather hopeless eyes.

“Do you think they would go well in double harness, those two?” he asked, diffidently. “Besides, Laurence is a little impatient of advice.”

Salvières reflected before replying. “I dare say! And whether she would get along with Tatiana—that’s the question!” He knocked the ashes out of his cold pipe, and thoughtfully replaced this object of his affections in its chamois-lined étui. “I bought this delightful article on the Jarozolimskà in Warsaw,” he casually remarked, “where it is claimed that the shops are better than in Paris. Lord! Moreover, the man who sold it to me said, with a lugubrious grin on his foolish Teutonic face, that this was the finest pipe ever made; and he was right, curiously enough, for I never had a better one. However, to return to our muttons, or rather to our lambkins: I’m afraid, Basil, that perhaps you are by way of building molehills into very tall mountains. You would scarcely have enjoyed a strong-minded, assertive wife—a leader at home and afield, violently interested in politics of every caliber, a platform orator, bowing from the waist up to admiring multitudes—i. e., the sort that so many unfortunate husbands are trying to get used to nowadays.”

Basil could not restrain a laugh. “My dear fellow,” he said, “I do not ask so much. You know very well that I consider men who help women to make fools of themselves unmanly crawlers. But between that and complete indifference to the masses—since you force me to adopt that jargon—there is a yawning gulf.”

“I dare say,” Salvières was beginning, when Countess Chouróff’s deep bass made itself heard at the door, and that lady, followed by four yards of purple-velvet draperies, advanced into the room and faced the two absconders.

“I have lived for years,” she exclaimed, “under the impression that I saw in you gentlemen an overworked Russian proprietor and a French Seigneur, overworked also, but in wifely interests. I apologize for my mistake; you are merely a couple of idlers, confirmed in that same lamentable sloth that enables men of the south to do nothing, very gracefully, for long hours at a time.”

“What procures us this withering indictment?” Salvières protested, laughing. “Remember, dear lady, that it is months—months since the rights of brotherhood have been exercised between Basil and myself! Would you proscribe them beneath your hospitable roof?”

“And what about the rights of my guests to the companionship of the two most important and—let me add—the two most agreeable personalities beneath the roof you invoke?” she replied, with spirit. “Give me your arm, Salvières; and as to you, Basil-Vassilièvitch, seek the protection of your own wife from the ides of my wrath. She is looking for you, anyhow,” she concluded, returning to a simpler form of address.

“Salvières,” she ruefully whispered in the ducal ear almost on a level with her mouth—for she was a remarkably tall woman—“that young and strangely disquieting couple need watching, or we will see them upset by the roadside.”

Salvières started a little and stared surprisedly at her.

“What makes you think that?” he asked, irritably, for his nerves were beginning to be jangled.

“Intuition, assisted by clear sight and miles of experience,” she said, gravely. “That sweet girl in there,” and she pointed to the buzzing drawing-room—which she often playfully alluded to as the sala-del-trono, because it was only thrown open on solemn occasions—“has been purposely created to cause the downfall of great and good men. Remember what I say. Some day, perhaps not so very distant, you’ll find that I’m no idle prophet.”

CHAPTER XI

My house and all it holds is thine,
But your deeds shall be no guests of mine.

Tverna, 12th of May.

My dear Régis,—I must apologize, and apologize humbly, for not having answered your letter sooner. To tell you the truth, we have “enjoyed”—as your Breton peasants say—some rather unquiet times here. When we first came, as you know, I found my “vassals” a trifle out of hand, but, after all, very reasonably so. Unfortunately the spirit of the age—or whatever you call it—has never ceased seeping through our marches—I should say marshes, the season being peculiarly rainy—and thus has my time been strenuously taken up by what I may term salvage-work, to the almost complete exclusion of any pleasanter occupation—this, of course, includes writing to those I love. In spite of the above-mentioned drawbacks, I am hale and hearty enough—that is to say that the years have not as yet left a serious mark upon me! Of course it is a great deprivation to abandon the sojourns abroad I used to delight in, but you see there is no choice in the matter. We spend a month or two every season in the Crimea, where the estates, of course, also demand the weary and wary eye of the master, but this cannot veraciously be described as a vacation, since work, work, work, is the keynote of my stay there. I wish I could have induced you to stop with us for a few weeks at least, during your trip around the world. How interested my cousin Marguerite must have been by this charming voyage. I hope she is well, and you also, my good Régis. Has she outgrown the “Gamin” stage? I can scarcely believe it of her—she is so essentially and delightfully young. And now I come to the heart of my letter, as it were. Laurence has for a long time, I fear, been homesick—I believe she never was anything else—as it is quite natural she should be, at so grim a distance from her own country. She is planning an expedition to the banks of the Thames, and I would willingly accompany her, but duty forbids so unlandlordly a thought, and so she will probably travel with Tatiana and Salvières, arriving in “Europe”—she insists that Russia is in no wise included in that division of the globe—some time in late June. After much reflection I have decided to let the boy accompany his mother, in the care of his niania, who has my absolute confidence. My occupations are such that I could not be much with him during Laurence’s absence. I am not certain whether a sojourn in England would suit him. He is, as you know, my treasure of treasures, and since you tell me that you intend leaving Paris for Plenhöel in June, could I, upon the strength of our long and loyal friendship, venture to impose yet another duty upon you? Perhaps you will think it pleasant. You are so kind-hearted. It is, namely, to accept my little Piotr as your guest, or rather charge, while Laurence visits her friends. The niania and my faithful old Garrassime, who never leaves him, will be responsible for his behavior. Am I too indiscreet? I think not, provided my cousin Marguerite pleads my cause with you. Tell her that I send Piotr to her as a little messenger from afar, a playfellow, or a toy, according to choice. He is very advanced for his age (all paternal pride laid aside), even too much so—which is one of the reasons why I think that a thorough change will be good for him—very advanced indeed, and sometimes preternaturally solemn, as his eminently Slav nature inclines him to be, not to mention some decidedly British and splenetic strain, inherited, doubtless, from some maternal ancestor or other.

I am waiting your reply very anxiously, and remain, my dear Régis,

Your devoted friend and cousin,
Basil.

Marguerite, curled up on an uncompromisingly bamboo lounge in the flower-gallery of the Hôtel de Plenhöel—where five years before she had bidden Basil farewell—was reading for the tenth time at least Basil’s letter, received some days before. Her father had answered it by return post—of course in the affirmative—and ever since then Marguerite had been preparing to receive her youthful guest.

At twenty-one the “Gamin” was still the “Gamin” of yore. To the eye she had not changed at all, yet she was more than ever the “Moonglade” of her cousin’s fancy, by right of some quality as apparent as the path of its transmission to the observer was obscure. She was the picture of ethereal health—if one may thus express oneself—so delicately tinted was her little person, so gravely sweet her eyes. The rose hue of her skin was the exact color of those tiny waxen blossoms the Bretons call fleurs-de-Jesus, that have but the very faintest hint of a blush beneath their white surface. Her hair was the same pale-golden nimbus as when she left her convent, but she wore it differently now—more smoothly coiled around her small head. In one word, there was about her a sort of crystalline aureole that set her apart from other beings. “Antinoüs,” if questioned, would have asserted—and with truth—that she was the “jolliest little chap” in creation, though a finer observer might have maintained that her laughter was often from the lips only and not from the eyes—those eyes that at this moment, while she was alone with Basil’s letter, were not entirely dry. Once or twice she breathed quickly, impatiently, as she thought of all that had happened. Indeed, the past years had sometimes been hard to get through with. She knew without the possibility of a doubt that Basil was not happy. She had never been told so, but, nevertheless, she knew! Had it been otherwise the “Gamin,” the gay and brave according to Jean de Salvières, would have felt differently, and accepted life and its burdens easily enough. Unfortunately, it cost her, in the light of this intuitive knowledge, a good deal of energy to do so, and her oft-repeated silent vows to think no more about it were writ in water.

She was looking forward with suppressed delight to the arrival of Piotr. Was he like his father, or his beautiful mother? she wondered. Marguerite adored children—especially little boys—and here again she was swayed by a clear-sightedness far beyond her age, for the modern little girl did not please her, less because of what they really are than on account of what they are bound to become—pleasure-loving, noisy, untutored beings, now that the wholesome principles of other times have been trampled under foot, and the fad for feminine “emancipation” has become the most dangerous craze the world has ever known.

The Hôtel de Plenhöel was en fête, and decked with flowers as for some royal reception; toys of superfine quality and astounding quantity were piled up in Marguerite’s personal salon to greet the baby prince, and all the morning Marguerite herself had flitted to and fro, up and down stairs, to arrange and prepare.

In an hour she would be with her father at the terminus, awaiting the private car attached to the express bringing Laurence and her suite, Piotr and his own. How large and magnificent that sounded! She suddenly laughed, pocketed Basil’s epistle, and jumped to her feet, ready for action. “Poor little boy!” she mechanically murmured. “I must hurry!” But why poor? She could not have said why, though instinctively she pitied the child—and pity is akin to love.

In her fresh summer frock of white piqué, a white-banded sailor-hat on her golden locks that seemed to shine as through a wash of silver, a knot of Malmaison carnations thrust through her waist-ribbon, she looked indeed exquisitely young as she stood beside “Antinoüs,” inside the station. He, too, had not altered, and was still the beau garçon, full of chic and vim, who conquered all hearts at the point of his blond mustache. There was a white carnation in his coat, and his straw hat, set at the exactly correct angle, gave him an almost boyish appearance.

In a few minutes the corridor-train came puffing up the shining metals in the wake of its spick-and-span locomotive, and the doors of the waiting-rooms were thrown wide. Marguerite had paled a trifle as she advanced to the private car (beside which now stood a Kossàk of the Russian Embassy in his dressing-gown of a coat, all brilliant with silver, holding high his astrakhaned head), and saw a graceful, languid figure wrapped in diaphanous veils, assisted to alight. Behind her came the towering form of old Garrassime, carrying in his arms a boy of startling beauty. “Antinoüs,” hat in hand, was already bowing before Laurence, who, disentangling a slim, gloved hand from her many dust-draperies, allowed him to press it to his lips.

“And here is Marguerite!” she drawled, as if surprised to see her there. “Grown old and wise, eh?” she continued, shaking hands limply and taking Régis’s arm.

“How are you, Laurence?” replied the “Gamin,” quietly. “Can I be of any use?” She was burning to take hold of Piotr, whose great dark eyes were scanning her from head to foot, but she had long since learned how to restrain her first impulses.

“You are too kind!” Laurence said, speaking “from the top of the head” (du haut de la tête), as the French say. She was the Princess and no mistake—perhaps even a little too much so—the conventional Princess of comedy and fiction as ordinary people understand her; but, after all, a very gracious presentment thereof, and Marguerite studiously refrained from smiling. “Yes, if you don’t mind, ma cousine,” Laurence continued, dwelling heavily upon this badge of kinship. “Tell them to carry the boy to your carriage—you have one in waiting, I suppose, have you not, Marquis?” she asked, turning to Régis. “And since you are so kind as to receive him and his people, I will only trouble you to take me as far as the equipage from the Embassy that is here for me!”

“Will you not honor us by residing under our roof?” asked Régis, inwardly wondering how long he would find it possible to continue using such very lofty language.

“Oh, thanks muchly ... you are very thoughtful; but you see my stay here will be but a few days. I am going on to London almost at once. It would not be worth while disturbing you, and I assure you that your amiability to the boy will fully suffice. Besides, I have promised their Excellencies Count and Countess Melidóff to be their guest. I was to have traveled with my sister and brother-in-law de Salvières, and stayed with them here; but at the last they altered their plans, which altered mine also.”

Régis, snubbed and delighted, was about to walk on with her, when she turned her eyes royally toward the still-saluting Kossàk, and said a few words to him in vile Russian. The man’s impassive face did not indicate comprehension, and to Laurence’s evident amazement Marguerite fluently repeated the order.

“Marguerite speaks Russian?” she asked, acidly, dropping all her languor.

“At your service, madame,” Régis replied, laughing. “And so do I; but as to the ‘Gamin,’ she is the finest linguist in Europe, with all her little modest airs.”

Princess Laurence moved on in brisker fashion, barely replying to Marguerite’s au revoir, and then only did the girl turn to Garrassime and his charge.

“Oh, you beauty!” she said, in a slightly unsteady voice, holding out both arms to Basil’s son.

“I’ll come to you,” the child lisped in French (much to his stalwart attendant’s surprise, for he was not easy), and he allowed himself to be taken up by Marguerite and kissed over and over again.

Régis was already returning, curbing with considerable difficulty a violent desire to laugh.

“Qu’est-ce qu’elle a cette cruche?” he whispered to his daughter as they settled themselves in the victoria with Piotr enthroned between them; then, noticing the boy’s observant eye, he continued in Spanish—a language they were both fond of using: “No wonder Basil writes so mournfully! Poor devil! Did you ever see such insufferable airs as that girl thinks it necessary to put on?”

Marguerite gave him a supremely roguish glance, imperceptibly raised one shoulder, and resumed her contemplation of the “little messenger from afar,” whose presence near her was such a pleasure, and who, to give him his due, was doing everything in his unconscious power to get himself adored in short order.

She was not, however, at the end of her surprises, for next morning bright and early, while superintending Monsieur Piotr’s toilet, she received a hurried scrawl from Laurence’s Serene-Highness, declining rather curtly a formal invitation to dinner at the Hôtel de Plenhöel, but asking Marguerite if she could “lend” her one of her salons for that same night to receive a few intimate friends, “as,” she ingenuously added, “I will feel much freer there as a hostess than if using the suite placed at my disposal by the Russian Ambassador.” There was not a word for or about Piotr, and the reader’s brows came rather brusquely together as she read.

Though she had retained all the untouched innocence of a highly bred French girl, Marguerite was no fool, and instantly scented something or other behind this strangely worded request—something that was not—well—not quite correct.

“Is the bearer waiting?” she asked of the footman at the dressing-room door.

“Yes, mademoiselle.”

“Tell him to keep on waiting, please,” and with an excuse to Piotr—who in his new-born enthusiasm was not minded to let her out of his sight—she hurried to her father’s study.

“Papa,” she said, a little breathlessly, “here’s a note from Laurence. What do you wish me to do about it?”

Régis ran his eye over the penetratingly perfumed sheet, and said nothing.

“Well,” repeated the “Gamin,” “what do you wish me to do, papa?”

“Say yes,” Régis replied, “but understand me, Chevalier, you are under no circumstances to be present when she comes to-night. Madame Laurence gives me the impression of having become even something more of a—a difficulty than she was as Mademoiselle Seton! I will for once—yes, for once—accept the responsibility of what she calls a reunion of her intimate friends. We shall see, or, rather, I shall see, what she means by it, but—”

He impulsively drew his daughter down, kissed her very tenderly, and let her go, and, smothering an expletive meant for Laurence, subsided into his arm-chair. After she had gone he sat quite still, plunged in profound thought, a most unusual proceeding for him. The “Chevalier Gamin” had never caused him one moment’s anxiety since, when orphaned in her cradle, she had become his dearest and most pressing preoccupation. But just now he suddenly perceived that there might be rocks ahead, such as had never yet disturbed the smooth current of his guardianship of her. Five years ago her return from the convent had been an unmixed and unspeakable joy. Nevertheless, had Basil asked him for her hand then, his great affection and esteem for his kinsman, coupled with a firmly rooted conviction that women can never marry too young, would have won his consent. Indeed, more than once, when seeing them so completely happy in each other’s company, he had deemed it by no means improbable that such a demand might soon be made. But when a very blind Fate ordained otherwise, and the ever-cheerful “Gamin” had remained to fill the old château with the rustle of her flying skirts, the music of her laughter, he had resolutely dismissed his guileless dream, and had been only too well content to keep with him this charming little compagnon de route. They had been thenceforth more like brother and sister than father and daughter. Together they had ridden and driven, yachted and swum, fenced and shot, and more lately they had undertaken that long voyage around the world—not as globe-trotters, bent upon engulfing as large a mass of indigestible and subsequently undigested facts and adventures as might be encompassed during a breathless race against time and tide, but as finely equipped dilettanti, who take pleasure in lingering over the savor of their every sensation; stopping here and there with album and palette—Marguerite never liked the merciless precision of even the best photograph—pausing a few extra days by the way to hear some celebrated musician, or witness a characteristic folk fête; losing themselves in jungles; dallying in wild regions to try their guns at big game; and being received everywhere with empressement and “distinguished consideration”—as the French love to put it. It had been an ideal two years of vagabondage, during which they had more often than not slept under tents, taken their meals al fresco, and sat together by camp-fires under the star-sown violet skies of extraordinarily lovely regions; always accompanied by Madame Hortense, as Marguerite’s dueña, and by François, Régis’s man, who had been with his master ever since regimental days in Algeria.

Now this all-play-and-no-work existence had come to an end, much to their regret, but they had many things of a pleasant kind to look forward to, including the coming months by the Breton sea. And, after all, reflected Régis, here was his lovely daughter still unwed at her majority. She had calmly and persistently declined all offers (and these had been many), arguing that she could never find a man worthy of comparison with her father and that she was too happy as she was to admit of any change. In all his knowledge, a woman of his race had never remained single after seventeen, and he suddenly drew his hand across his forehead as if to dismiss an unfortunate thought buzzing around his brain.

After a time he rose and strode to one of the windows giving on the garden. The weather was admirable, the sky of indescribable purity, the huge lindens skirting the walls were loaded down with little tufts of perfume, and the grass, still empearled with dew where the sun did not strike, was enameled with scores of little golden planets—dandelions defended by the “Gamin,” who loved them, from the gardener’s spudder—and further embellished by a flight of familiar doves who lived in an ivy-garlanded cote near by.

On the middle of the lawn he saw the “Gamin” holding a flat basket from which Piotr—a charming little figure in his mujik costume, imitated in white drill, his tiny tall boots and jaunty cap—snatched handfuls of crumbs for the hungry birds. Moodily Régis took in the pretty scene. Why was not this baby his grandson? Why—now that he thought of it—had Basil not married Marguerite instead of that infernal poseuse of a Laurence? He a grandfather! The idea made him laugh—he felt so absurdly young—and he stepped back to glance at himself in a mirror! Slender and active as at twenty, with not one line of white to pale his corn-colored pate, he gave no idea of grandfatherly dignity. But, never mind, it would have been pleasant, all the same, and he shrugged an impatient shoulder.

A shriek of delight from Piotr on the lawn brought him quickly again to the open window. The child was running toward the stooping doves, clapping his pudgy hands to frighten them away from their breakfast, and Marguerite on silent feet was skimming across the turf after him.

“Naughty, naughty Piotr!” she cried, catching him before much harm was done, and bearing him away from the whirling flock. “You must not give sorrow to the birds!” (“faire du chagrin aux petits oiseaux.”)

Kicking and struggling vigorously, Piotr heeded not at all the wise admonition. “Naughty Malou!” he yelled, vainly trying to break her hold. “Naughty Malou, let Piotr go!”

Marguerite’s laughter rippled under the drooping linden branches, in her delight at the pretty perversion of her name.

“No! No!” she panted, for the boy was heavy, “Malou will not let Piotr go! What would your papa say if he saw you frightening my birds, Piotr? What do you think? Eh?”

At the mention of his father Piotr grew still and glanced up at Marguerite between his long dark lashes.

“Piotr loves papa!” he stoutly declared in Russian. “Piotr wants to see papa, not mamma. Piotr hates mamma!”

“Oh, baby!” exclaimed the deeply shocked Marguerite. “You mustn’t say that! Your mamma is so beautiful!”

She had put him down on the gravel walk under Régis’s window; but she did not see her father, who had dropped the lace curtain before him. He was curious to see how this would end.

“Malou is beautiful, not mamma!” the young insubordinate gravely responded, planted in front of his new passion, both small fists clenched and hanging at his sides. “Mamma scolds Piotr always. Ask Garrassime. Bring him here, Malou; and ask niania, too!”

Marguerite glanced quickly toward the house. The niania (nurse) was not in sight; but Garrassime, the ever-faithful, who never remained far away from his beloved charge, was lurking behind a clump of rhododendrons, and at a sign from her advanced and uncovered his gray head.

“Does Prince Pierre often talk like this?” she asked, rather sadly.

“Alas! Your Nobility,” the old servitor replied, “it does happen; I grieve to say. Your Excellency must pardon him, he means no harm. He does not understand what he says.”

Piotr, sitting flat on the gravel, was engrossed in manufacturing a miniature mountain with the end of a bit of stick escaped from the gardener’s rake, and had evidently forgotten all about the discussion in hand.

The “Gamin” smiled up at Garrassime in the fashion which invariably enslaved all beholders. “Oh!” she said, half-voicedly—she did not want Piotr to hear. “I did not mean it as a reproach, Garrassime, but does not your mistress resent such sayings?”

The old man raised his eyes imploringly to the blue sky above. “When she hears! When she hears!” he murmured. “But The Illustrious sees little of the boy, Your Nobility. He is mostly with the Prince at home, or with me or his niania. He is a noble child, but vivacious and fond of his own way.”

“I see!” comprehended Marguerite. “He is very winsome, very handsome. Do you think, Garrassime, that he will not pine for his father?”

The servitor of the House of Palitzin for forty loyal years looked steadily at his master’s young cousin and nodded his wise head.

“He would without doubt have done so, were it not for Your Nobility. It is strange, for he does not make friends easily, and yet not so strange,” he added, his eyes fixed upon her; “but he has of a certainty given his blessed little heart into Your Nobility’s keeping, Excellency. God be praised for it! We will have no trouble now. He is very like his illustrious father,” he concluded, almost in a whisper, and Régis from behind his curtain saw a slow flush of deep rose spread over his “Gamin’s” fair face.

“Je ne suis décidément qu’un imbécile!” he apostrophized himself wrathfully, and noiselessly he quitted his post of observation. He had seen enough, and more than enough!

At ten o’clock that night the Marquis de Plenhöel descended the perron steps to hand Laurence from her coupé. She was marvelously gowned in dying-azure coruscated with diamond stars, and with loose-locked clusters of lilac orchids playing hide-and-seek in the lace of her train. She gave a rapid glance about her as she was being ceremoniously conducted to the great salon on the first floor, and when Régis bowed her in she asked, with an equivocal smile that made him writhe internally:

“Where is Marguerite?”

“Up-stairs in her own apartments,” he said, shortly, “taking a cup of tea with our old friend Madame de Montemare—I think you met her here some five years ago.”

“I think I remember the occasion,” Laurence acquiesced without much enthusiasm; “and tell me, Cousin Régis”—this was the first time she had thus honored him—“is Marguerite ... are they coming down later?”

“No,” Régis responded. “Marguerite does not like society; and as to Madame de Montemare, she claims that her circle of acquaintances is already too large, so she firmly refuses to increase it.”

“Too bad! Too bad!” Laurence remarked, with a faint sigh of relief, her brilliant eyes roving over the magnificent drawing-room with its Louis XIV. furniture and tapestries lighted by many antique lamps, and wax candles in sconces and appliques half drowned in verdure and flowers.

“It is charming here!” she approved. “So mellow and distingué; different, altogether different from any place I know.”

Régis smiled a mere smile and bowed a little bow that vexed Laurence, in spite of her lovely thick skin.

“You are very good!” the master of this “mellow” and “distingué” establishment admitted. “It has the merit of antiquity in a time altogether too modern—according to my poor views at least.”

“You are a hardened Royalist!” she observed, with the least suspicion of a sneer. “A lover of all that no longer exists.”

“And you, madame, are assuredly Imperial and modern à outrance!” he retorted with another bow.

“In Russia one has to be an Imperialist,” she said, densely; “but politics do not interest me.”

“Even in Russia?” he asked, curiously.

“Especially there!” she said, quickly, an expression of mingled fear and disgust flitting over her features.

He was looking down at her where she sat on a low ottoman almost at his feet, and the extreme décolletage of her sumptuous gown amazed him. “I am glad I did not let my Chevalier see her; she’s getting quite brazen!” he thought, and added aloud, in order to say something, “That must sound odd to the Russian-speaking ear!”

She clapped her gloved hands. “Oh!” she said. “Delicious! That is the finest Irish bull I ever heard.”

He laughed a bit awkwardly. “I beg your pardon,” he apologized. “I was not thinking of what I was saying.”

“So I perceive,” she returned, and, rising quickly, she added: “I think I hear a motor stopping. Some of my friends, probably.”

“Probably,” he assented. “So permit me to take leave of you for the present. Pray command me if I can do anything else. There are, I believe, some—refreshments prepared in the adjoining room, and the butler is in attendance.”

“But,” she murmured, showing embarrassment for the first time, “are you not going to be one of us? It—it would not disturb me.”

“Thank you for this kindly assurance.” He bowed low as he spoke, and without another word made his exit by a side-door, leaving her to go forward and greet whoever it was that was coming.

At the farther end of the drawing-room was a carven balcony where some tall palms and ferns stood, which was reached by an outer staircase. There, on gala-nights, musicians were placed to underline the conversation, so to speak, by graceful melodies executed on harp and violin, cello and viola-d’amore. It had been a pretty conceit of Régis’s mother thus to entertain her guests, and the Marquis, who had adored her, and never passed the graceful nook without a thrust of reminiscence, paused for a moment on his way up-stairs—between the heavy draperies that separated it from the landing. It never entered his head that from where he stood he could see without being seen. Indeed, he was at the moment quite absorbed in debating with himself whether he had not been extremely stupid to allow Laurence the privilege she was now enjoying. Though by no means straitlaced, Régis de Plenhöel felt almost as if her presence here, under present circumstances, was a desecration of his mother’s memory—of his daughter’s purity; for he had not liked Laurence’s demeanor just now. And then he heard something that made him coolly step upon the balcony and look down. He remained there absolutely petrified and immovable, for immediately beneath was Laurence, her white arms clasped around the neck of a tall man whom, with a start of amazement, he recognized as Captain Neville Moray, the British Military Attaché, whom he had occasionally met since that famous evening five years ago, and always with pleasure.

“At last—at last! After a whole long year!” he heard Laurence say; but he scarcely knew her voice again, it was so full of warmth and of passion. In a moment Régis recovered himself sufficiently to see in a flash the abominable situation in which his customary easy-going habits had placed not only himself, but his little daughter, and a fine moisture broke out upon his forehead.

“The wretched woman!” he said, almost aloud, so great was his perturbation, and just then the subdued hum of a second motor reached him. “I wonder who now!” he soliloquized, precipitately retreating behind one of the palms at the back of the balcony—ready for inaction, as it were, for, in spite of all his savoir-faire, he no longer knew to which saint he should address his prayers. “Has she perhaps given a double rendez-vous here?” he cogitated, and as if to give him right, absurd as the supposition seemed, he suddenly heard coming from below the humorous greetings of his old acquaintance, Preston Wynne. So great was his surprise that he once more advanced, this time with every precaution, and peered downward into his own state salon. Laurence, like a well-behaved hostess, was seated now on a canapé before Moray and Wynne, and two other gentlemen, unknown to Régis, who wore on their dress-coats the insignia of several Orders, were hovering about her. Evidently too shrewd to invite Moray alone, she was giving a little semi-official reception, expecting, doubtless, by this move to pull the wool over his, Régis’s, eyes. Reassured by the safety of numbers, he hurried to his study, where he summoned his old confidential servant and envoy extraordinary.

“François,” he said, as soon as the valet entered, “you will see that her Serene-Highness Princess Palitzin does not leave the house without my being advised of it. Remain in the little octagonal room off the main hall, and come and warn me the moment she asks for her carriage.”

François saluted in the military fashion—a habit he had never been able to lose—and was on the point of retreat when his master called him back.

“The Princess,” he said, “is receiving some friends here to-night, as you know. Find out who has already arrived, and report to me.”

“That man is worth his weight in gold,” mused the much-perturbed “Antinoüs.” “He knows everybody by sight, has capacious ears and a silent tongue. They don’t make them like that any longer, more’s the pity!” And snatching up an evening paper, which he did not even pretend to read, he awaited François’s return with such patience as he could muster.

In a few minutes that greatest of the world’s wonders, a perfect servant, re-entered and respectfully stood at his master’s elbow, waiting to be questioned.

“Well!” said Régis.

“So far, Monsieur le Marquis,” quietly stated the old soldier, who looked like a retired general in his irreproachable evening dress, “there are in the salon with her Serene-Highness Monsieur le Capitaine Moray of the British Embassy; Monsieur Wynne of America; his Excellency the Marquis di Sebastiani, Italian Chargé-d’Affaires; Sefim Bey of the Ottoman Embassy; Monsieur le Comte de Védrines, attached to the French Embassy at St. Petersburg—now on leave; Monsieur le Vicomte de Braisles, First Secretary of the French Embassy at Madrid—also on leave; and Lord Charles Arbuthnot of the British Foreign Office.”

Régis had not moved a muscle during this magnificent nomenclature. “A concert of the great Powers,” he muttered to himself.

“Monsieur says?” inquired François.

“Nothing of any importance. But, by the way, François, how did you discover the names of the noble assemblage down below?”

“Monsieur le Marquis knows how easily chauffeurs jabber. Ah! It is not like the old times when the gens-de-maison knew how to keep their places with dignity! Then it took science to find out anything; but now! Monsieur le Marquis has doubtless noticed that servants are no longer what they used to be.”

In spite of himself Régis smiled. “You are unique, my good François!” he remarked. “If any further—arrivals should take place, keep me posted,” and with a nod he dismissed the paragon.

During the next two hours, withdrawn in his sanctum, the exasperated Marquis received at regular intervals from François a series of discreet intimations that half a dozen more personages of high degree had honored his domicile by their appearance within its walls; all men, all young or youngish, all attached to embassies or occupying official positions, excepting one, who was a cavalry officer known all over France for his great wealth and his unlaudable eccentricities.

“I wonder,” raged poor “Antinoüs,” champing his bit, “why she didn’t invite the Papal Nuncio while she was about it! It would certainly have added cachet to the assembly. What in the world is she up to? Trying to hoodwink me?” And throwing the paper-knife he had been busying his fingers with to the other end of the room, he walked slowly after it; not with the intention of replacing it on his desk, but just to see how far it had gone.

Just then the door opened half-way, and François once more insinuated his person into the aperture.

“Son Altesse Sérénissime is alone, and would thank Monsieur le Marquis for his hospitality,” he announced in a tone lugubrious enough for a judge in the black cap about to pronounce sentence. The heavy clouds on his master’s brow had not escaped his keenness of observation, and whatever happened to be his master’s mood, François loyally and unconsciously echoed it.

“D—n Her Serene-Highness!” Régis growled in his mustache, and walked quickly down-stairs.

How he had planned to meet Laurence he remembered not at all as he found her carelessly fingering the sheaf of roses basking in a rock-crystal vase on a little table at her side. There was an absent smile about her pretty mouth and, for the first time in his knowledge of her, a peculiarly dreamy look in her splendid eyes. She turned, however, at the slight noise of his steps on the thick rugs, and presented him with a very soft glance.

“I am going now,” she said, enchantingly. “But I could not do so without telling you all the nice things I think of you, Cousin Régis. It was really kind to let me believe myself even for a few hours the mistress of so adorable a place as this. I take it that Marguerite is already tucked in her little white bedlet, so I will ask you to say good night to her for me—to-morrow morning”.

She was speaking a little excitedly; “worrying her fan,” Régis thought, with undue violence, and there was now a very becoming tinge of pink in her soft cheeks. At his daughter’s name, however, “Antinoüs” stiffened like a pointer, and without any suavity whatsoever, said:

“May I beg you to grant me a few minutes?”

Laurence’s hazel orbs through a curtain of silken lashes fixed themselves coquettishly upon him.

“But, certainly,” she readily acquiesced; “it will be a pleasure—I owe you a reward, anyhow!” And she seated herself in a high-backed carven chair, upon which it was easy to adopt regal airs.

“C’est trop fort!” inwardly commented Régis, and, disregarding her inviting gesture toward a pile of cushions near her, he leaned one hand upon the rose-table, and began to speak in a grave voice of which she had never supposed him capable.

“Madame,” he said, slowly, “you have placed me in a difficult position, and as I believe in plain dealing and plain speaking, I am about to ask you, without further preparation, what you intend to do about it.”

Laurence straightened herself brusquely. The color fled from her face, and with it the very essence of her brilliant beauty.

“I!” she exclaimed. “I have put you in a difficult position? Would it be too much to ask you, monsieur, how I have contrived to be so unfortunate?”

“Assuredly, madame; that is exactly what I am here to do. I was unlucky enough to witness—wholly by accident—two or three hours ago your meeting with Captain Moray.”

Laurence, who had already guessed something of the sort, indulged in a low, insolent laugh.

“Such ‘accidents’ have a name, monsieur,” she said, with considerable effrontery. “They enter, it seems to me, into the province of espionage—of—the Third Section, if you prefer.”

Régis passed over the intended insult as though it were not worth picking up.

“By accident,” he quietly repeated. “And much as I dislike calling a woman to account, especially beneath my own roof, I desire—as I have already given myself the honor of telling you—to know from your own lips what you intend to do about it!”

Laurence for a second asked herself whether or no she could brazen the thing out. How much had he seen or heard? Perhaps this was only a “feeler,” a mere trick to get rid of her whom he did not like—she had long ago perceived that. A swift glance at him, however, showed her a Régis so different from the gay and debonnaire Grand Seigneur she had known until then that she felt a little shiver of fear pass between her very bare shoulders.

“Do about what?” she questioned. “You presume a good deal, Monsieur de Plenhöel, to address me as you are doing.” She was marking time, and he knew it.

“Rest assured, madame, that I am not here for my pleasure,” he replied. “You seem to forget that I am your husband’s kinsman and friend—not to enumerate other capacities which had better not be mentioned just now. At any rate, I am endeavoring to do my best for his sake, and that of one or two more persons—your son, for instance. But if you persist in the line—of defense—you seem to have taken up, I will bow you out, and take my own course in the matter.”

“But really, monsieur, I have not the faintest idea of what you want of me—of what you accuse me! Is this a joke, or do you genuinely imagine that you have me at a disadvantage?”

“I believe in the testimony of my own eyes.”

“Indeed! Well, and what did your own eyes testify to, that so greatly offends a—mondain like yourself?”

Régis felt that he could have joyously beaten her with a schoolroom birch, but chivalry has its drawbacks, and he had to be content with an utterly futile clenching of the fingers, which she observed with pleasure. If she could only make him lose his temper!

“I saw you,” he said, now quite brutally frank, “with your arms about Captain Moray’s neck, and as if that were not sufficient, I heard you acknowledge your love for him.”

Laurence played her next card with praiseworthy determination.

“Well—and what of it?” she said. “You chose to spy upon me, but you have merely discovered a mare’s nest. Since you want the truth, I’ll give it to you on all-fours. Captain Moray and I have known each other since childhood, and there has always been a deep affection between us. Hearing of my arrival in Paris, he hastened to call upon me at the Embassy. I was out, and later on I sent him a petit-bleu inviting him here to-night with several other friends ... and—your assent. As to my greeting to him, it is perfectly natural and proper after so many years’ separation; nothing more than it should have been. Are you satisfied?”

“No!” answered Régis, looking down at her with a grim smile, and suddenly she came face to face with her position. What could she offer the Marquis to win him over, to silence him? She was dealing with a man who—so to speak—held the best cards. Would he play them? She breathed hard, for she was passing in those short seconds through æons of torture. Her high position, her whole future, her as yet unblemished name, were utterly and completely at Régis’s mercy.

“What more do you want, then?” she asked at last, in a lowered voice that was shaking with dread and anger. She broke off with a ghastly forced laugh, and attempted to meet his straight glance with sullen, defiant eyes, but her gaze slowly fell before his own.

“I do not want much,” Régis said, bending a little toward her and emphasizing each word by a gentle tap of his fingers on the inlaid table-top. “I am not your judge, nor do I desire to persecute you. Of that rest assured.”

He paused, and in the intense silence that followed, a shower of rose-petals dropping to the floor was almost painfully audible.

“If this is the case, what do you demand of me?” she murmured, her head drooping so that he could see the artificial waving of her hair rising from her white neck to the circlet of her starred diadem.

“First of all, that you should never see Marguerite again, excepting in public and when it absolutely cannot be avoided,” he said, with a sort of repressed intensity that made her wince. “Secondly, that during your stay away from your husband you should, as far as possible, avoid us. The rest is with you. You know very well that I will not betray what I have discovered—to my amazement and regret. To preach is just as far from my mind and character. But remember; if ever Basil learns that you have stepped down from the pedestal upon which he placed you, he will be unmerciful.”

“But”—she struggled—“there is nothing—I have done nothing—to deserve his anger! Your ‘Madonna’ is in no danger from me. I am an honest woman. I swear it! I swear it! I have never seen Captain Moray since my marriage before to-night.”

She was white as a sheet now, and Régis remained silent. Where was the use of quoting her own words to her—“at last—at last—after a whole long year!” Did she even remember them in her terror and confusion? He knew with the intuitive certainty of a squire of dames that she was not the sort to entertain a platonic affection—he had known that long before. She was defending herself as best she could, according to her limitations, and all the manhood in him revolted against prolonging the scene.

“You are upset,” he said, with less severity of tone, though his irritation had not diminished. “Supposing we let the matter drop now? I will, if you permit me, take you home. I have told you what I expect of you. Let it stop at that.”

Once again he became the polished man of the world, his mask admirably reattached, and as he spoke he bowed deferentially.

For a moment she did not appear to have heard him. Her attitude was one miserable alluring droop, and from its nest of laces and frou-frous one exquisitely shod foot peeped out among the fallen rose-petals on the floor. The pose was clever.

“Why do you dislike me—so—so—much?” she murmured, gazing fixedly downward at her little jeweled slipper, timidly busy amid the ruin of the roses.

Régis glanced at this amusing by-play and carefully denied himself the luxury of a smile.

“I said nothing of the sort,” he politely countered. “But it is getting very late, Princess.” He employed the title with deliberate bad taste. “May I have your carriage called?”

Laurence rose with a great rustle of her flowing silks, and stood dry-lipped before him. She made an evident effort to speak, but mortification and rage forbade this. Her eyes were flashing like yellow zircons, and he looked at her in some apprehension, though the firm set of his mouth did not relax. Then without warning she swayed forward, seized his hand in both her own, as if to support herself, and, falling against his shoulder, burst into a passion of sobs.

“Well, that’s the bouquet!” thought the irrepressible Régis, supporting her with no good will—this gay butterfly was in a virtuous mood! Besides, she was emphatically not his style, as he had remarked five years ago; also—under stress of weather, as it were—her methods were becoming somewhat too crude for this rafiné, used to more delicate behavior on the part of the women he admired.

“You—you—won’t be convinced!” she sobbed, clutching the lapel of his coat. “You are a—h—h—harsh man—Régis!” There was great tenderness in the way she pronounced his name.

With difficulty he managed to unclasp the slender fingers, and, holding her at a distance by a gentle pressure on the wrists, he looked full at her—this time with an imperceptible smile.

“You are a very pretty woman, Princess, but do not waste your best weapons upon so negligible a person as myself—I am fire-proof.”

A bright spot of color sprang into each of her pale cheeks—which, by the way, showed no trace of tears. Her white teeth clicked together and she drew back violently.

“You insult me, Monsieur de Plenhöel,” she cried. “First you accuse me of having a lover, and now you infer that I wish to win you, too!”

Once more Régis bowed. “Madame,” he said, smiling more openly, “I am not a coxcomb, but I realize that all means are fair in war, so I exonerate you of any design save that of self-protection.” Whereupon he slipped her hand under his arm, drew her to the door of the main hall, and called François. In a few moments more he had solicitously wrapped her in her long cloak, and was escorting her to her waiting brougham before she could find a word to say.

“A prolonged tête-à-tête would offer no inducements to either of us now,” she said at last, in a wonderfully collected voice, “so do not come with me; but be assured that we shall meet again and that I shall know how to thank you for this evening’s hospitality.”

“Mille grâces, madame! Une hospitalité tout à fait Écossaise!” he murmured, handing her into her carriage, and as she drove off she could see him, still bowing, on the last of the granite steps. Behind him the state antechamber and staircase blazed with light, which, fortunately, prevented her from seeing the expression of his face.

“And now how explain to the Chevalier? How keep Basil in the dark when he writes asking for news?” Régis thought, while regaining his study. His brows were knit, and for the second time that night he sank into deep thought from the depths of an arm-chair, smoking cigarette after cigarette, without, however, attaining to any satisfactory conclusion. “Elle n’est pas très forte,” he said several times to himself during the course of this long cogitation. No, Laurence was not very strong in the sense he meant. Her finesses were sewn with white thread, her attempts at duping her fellow-creatures not quite sufficiently finished in detail, yet she seemed to have hoodwinked, tricked, done ... that splendid chap, her husband! Régis moved restlessly. Of course he knew how some husbands could be blinded in spite of the sun, the moon, and the stars of every magnitude staring them in the face, but Basil was not made of that stuff. Then for an instant the pendulum swung back, and he asked himself whether he could possibly have been unjust. His long-standing antipathy for Laurence! Had it led him astray? He angrily threw one leg over the arm of his chair and asked himself that question squarely and fairly. “No! A thousand times no!” he suddenly exclaimed aloud. “I saw it all. Her eyes, her lips, her poise, were not those of an innocent woman—and her little attempt upon my own modest virtue! Pah! It’s all as clear as daylight, and time will show it to be only too true. Meanwhile I’m going to take my Chevalier to farthest Brittany at once. It will be safer.”

He rose, stretched himself, laughed a little nervously, and moved slowly up-stairs. As he passed the flower-gallery he heard the rush of fierce wind and rain driving on the glass dome. Against the rosy glow of the half-lowered hanging-lamps he saw a flock of sodden leaves clinging to the panes like great, green moths, seeking entrance to escape from the sudden squall, and with something between a yawn and a sigh he went on to his own rooms.

CHAPTER XII

Honor and old ideals, I fear
Are with the snows of yester-year,
Or like old houses—straitly mewed
In some sequestered solitude.

A Russian forest is assuredly one of the most impressive of all sights, especially in winter when the world has put on its ermine mantle. Soundless in its depths as the deeps of the sea—hushed in its silence like the great Sahara—save when an overloaded branch succumbs to its weight of snow and breaks with the dry crack of a gun, it seems utterly untenanted by beast or bird. The latter always congregate on the fringes of the villages, where grain is always to be found, owing to the gracious custom which causes every inhabitant at harvest-time to hang a sheaf beneath the eaves; while the bears have withdrawn into the comfortable quarters they have prudently arranged for themselves at the first serious hint of real cold. Wolves there are, on the prowl in the sly, shambling fashion which is peculiarly their own, but after sundown only—at least until emboldened by starvation. Now and then a ptarmigan, as white as the bitter season itself, flits heavily above the underlying thicket, though his appearance is as rare almost as when a capercailzie (kurópatkà) starts up to break the stillness with a tumult of wings and a sifting of powdery snow.

In the “wealthy” forests belonging to great territorial nobles, broad paths—or narrow roads—are cut and numbered, like the allées of some colossal park, and there, sleighs as also saddle-horses, become the easy means of pleasure to the owners or their guests. For there are few sensations more exhilarating and buoyant than to gallop upon those clear, smooth avenues between the serried trunks of trees, upbearing like the pillars of some Gothic cathedral the roof of a silent world.

Such a forest was that skirting the estate of the Duchesse de Salvières, née Palitzin, and in the dark before a bitter November dawn—bitter even for that glacial region—this charming person herself, masked to the eyes in fur, was driving her tröika furiously in the direction of Tverna. To drive a tröika, whether on earth or on snow, is an accomplishment seldom acquired by women, but Tatiana-Vassilièvna de Salvières—who never lost an occasion of declaring that she was not a woman—knew the art as thoroughly as the foremost yèmshik in Muscovy.

Her above-mentioned pretensions were, fortunately, not borne out by any stigma of masculinity, either physical or mental—unless one could class in the latter category a fixity of purpose, a calm courage, and an inexhaustible fund of dogged endurance; which qualities, either singly or in combination, are wholly foreign to the feminine nature. Extremely lovely still, with her graceful oval face lighted by deep dark-gray eyes, and framed in warm-chestnut hair threaded already with narrow ribbons of clear silver, her short, authoritative nose, her firm, well-arched mouth and obstinate little chin, deft by a characteristic fossette, she was what the French graphically call faite au tour (made on a turner’s lathe). She was not tall, but admirably proportioned: slim-waisted, full-hipped, and square-shouldered, and her hands, extraordinarily small, but yet in no way resembling the useless, tapering, monkey-like variety so dear to flashy novelists under the appellation of mains de Duchesse, were shaped on an especially artistic model, which showed both character and strength. Her feet followed suit, amusingly high-arched, eminently aristocratic, and yet capable of being stood upon with supple energy, under any and every circumstance, and from her whole being there emanated a vigor, a self-reliance, and a savoir-faire altogether uncommon in these slouchy, spineless, neurasthenic days.

Such was the sister-in-law given by a far-seeing Providence to Laurence Seton, Princess Basil Palitzin, and lucky it was for her that this was so, for, to put it mildly, that fair daughter of Albion was just then seriously dismayed by a certain hornet’s nest that she had wilfully broken open.

After her unwilling and ungracious return from “abroad,” as she distinguished between Russia and other more fortunate European countries, Laurence had consented, not without painfully apparent reluctance, to reintegrate the Castle of Tverna during the hunting and shooting season. Great parties of guests had then filled the place and made life endurable to her for the time being; but when these had departed and she had succeeded in making her husband promise to take her to Petersburg for the winter, a sudden call to the bedside of an aunt who was also his godmother—a relationship very seriously considered in Russia—had forced him to leave in haste just as the first heavy snow was beginning to fall. He had not done so without many qualms of anxiety; for not only did he by now fully realize the unpopularity of his wife on his estates, but also the fact that the peasants’ restlessness was slowly increasing, owing to the scantiness of the last harvest. Every precaution had been taken by him, however, to protect Laurence from any sort of annoyance during an absence that might be prolonged if he found his aged relative in danger; but notwithstanding this he had left Tverna with a heavy heart and an anxious mind.

Alone, or practically so, in the grim old cradle of her husband’s race—for her maternal instincts had remained utterly undeveloped, and her little son’s absence was always preferred by her to his company—Laurence found time hanging wearily on her hands. From morning till night, dressed with the costliness and splendor she was so fond of, she paced about the long enfilades of salons and galleries between which all the doors remained wide open, Russian fashion, bemoaning her unlucky fate. Now and again she paused before one or another of the interminable lines of windows fronting upon the steppe—the rooms were kept so warm that there was no rime on the glass—and could have shrieked aloud at the awful immensity stretched out beneath her. To this peculiar mind the prospect held no beauty, no grandeur even, though it possessed both in a great and marked measure. The Castle itself, built as it were from the rock whereon it stands, is gray as its gray escarpments, abrupt and uncompromising—a fortress armed cap-à-pie, impregnable to assault from three sides. At its back rises the mountainous ridge punctuated by the “Tverna rock”—as it is designated—which quickly broadens into an upland, miles and miles wide, dense with forest that, after a fashion, shelters the vast sweep of the rearward walls.

Basil had already been gone two weeks, and little by little Laurence’s exasperation had been growing to unbearable proportions, when one afternoon, as she, according to her custom, was trailing her fur-bordered velvets up and down the first floor, Garrassime presented himself before her—hands crossed upon breast, and head bowed, as is the rule of inferiors toward their masters there.

“What do you want?” Laurence threw at him over her shoulder, not deigning to pause for the fraction of a second in her caged-tigress walk.

“The staròstá, Your Highness, waits below, and would crave the boon of a short audience.”

Laurence turned irritably and came toward Garrassime.

“Indeed! Then let him know that I have no time to waste upon such as he!” she said, contemptuously.

Garrassime recoiled as if he had been struck, and, instinctively retreating to the nearest wall, put as great a distance between himself and his mistress as space would allow.

“Well, why don’t you go?” she demanded, stamping her narrow foot, “instead of looking at me like a distressed owl. D’you hear?”

“I will go—Highness—I will go—but the staròstá reports two cases of typhus in the village—at least he thinks it is typhus, and he prays a doctor may be sent for, and disinfectants, and—”

“Typhus!” Laurence cried, falling back in her turn. “And you dare to approach me after speaking to that infected man! Go away! Go away! This instant!”

But Garrassime did not move. For once, on the contrary, he straightened himself to his full and enormous height, as if no longer in presence of a loftier personality, and when he spoke it was in altered accents.

“There is no risk, no danger!” he said, as he would have done to reassure a fretful child. “He, the staròstá, has not been near the houses where there is sickness—but there will be worse erelong if one does not act promptly. Had there been risk of contagion I would not have gone near him, for Prince Piotr’s sake—indeed, Your Highness, not for mine, but for Prince Piotr’s.”

“How do you know whether there is risk or not?” Laurence exclaimed, violently drawing her skirts around her. “Send for twenty doctors, if you like. What do I care! I am going. I’ll leave here to-day. Give orders for instant departure. Prince Piotr and his household can come away, too. But go, go at once, and see to it!”

She was clutching distractedly at the back of a chair, and her fingers fidgeted restlessly upon it. Garrassime was gazing at her in absolute consternation. What was he to do in so unexpected a dilemma—so unheard-of a situation! And this was his beloved master’s wife—the Princess—the mother of the Boy-Heir of his—Garrassime’s—adoration!

“Your Highness does not know,” he said, without moving from his place, “that the doctor is far away. He has twenty thousand souls to look after, and will not move without peremptory orders from the Zèmtsvo, or from Your Highness, since his Excellency our Prince is not here.”

“And if it gets worse?” Laurence asked, shivering like a leaf. “If there is more of that plague coming? If—”

“Bòg dâl y Bòg vzial,” Garrassime gravely replied (God gave and God took!). “That is all we will say then, Highness. It is for you, Illustrious, however, to prevent its happening—if it can yet be done!”

“The land-steward and the intendant must look to it all!” Laurence cried, tripping over her words. “You are here to take care of me—of Prince Piotr. You must not have anything to do with this ghastly affair!”

Garrassime, hiding his indignation, advanced nearer to her unreproved; she was too frightened now to notice it. “The people,” he pronounced, with slow respect, “would long since have starved, or died of many sicknesses, had our lords not taken care of them. The taxes are heavy, Your Highness. We of the villages were happier a thousand times as serfs—before the Little White Father of other days—peace be to his soul—gave them their liberty.” Here Garrassime bowed three times, crossing himself devoutly, and Laurence, held by something she could not have explained, stood still, watching him. “There is nothing left,” the gray-haired servitor ventured on, “but to help them in every way, and that is what the Prince, Your Highness’s Illustrious Consort, has always done, as his noble father did before him. By their holy forethought cholera has already been almost frightened away, and the people no longer starve. But there are other evils, Highness—and we—that is, they thought—that in the absence of our beloved master, Your Highness might consider—the welfare of—his—people, Highness—that you might wish to do for them what he does.”

She gave a short toss of the head. There was an expression of extreme disgust in her whole attitude that did not escape him, and perhaps emboldened him to go yet further.

“Your Highness cannot leave them now,” he said, almost sternly. “Not while His Excellency is away, while they are so hard pressed already. His Excellency’s forefathers through many, many generations have aided and saved the forefathers of these in pain and trouble. Remember that, Highness.”

“Cannot leave!” cried Laurence. “Cannot leave! Is there somebody here or anywhere with enough effrontery to call me to order?”

Garrassime glanced at her flashing eyes, at her white, furious face, and suddenly he dropped to his knees before her, in a dumb attitude of passionate entreaty, his hands clasped and upstretched to her. At last he spoke: “You are our Lady, our hereditary Providence, our all-powerful Mistress!” he said, almost as pale as she. “Have mercy upon them—upon yourself also—Highness. Do not show the people that you do not care—that you really are a stranger to them. They are a strange sort here, Highness. You do not know—you do not know!”

Tears of anguish were in the eyes of the giant as he knelt there at her feet, almost on the sumptuous folds of her gown. His inheritance and training admitted of no other belief than that those living on the land were born to look up to their Princes and Princesses, and that these latter had been put into the world for few other purposes than to help the peasants—no longer serfs, and therefore no longer valuable property—as long as they needed help. It was a simple and direct creed, encouraged by Basil, easily assimilated and followed, and in his heart Garrassime prayed passionately that she might not close her eyes and ears to his entreaties; that God would not allow her to harden her heart.

Trembling with fright, Laurence once more stepped back. Her hatred of Russia and everything Russian was so intense for the moment that it obliterated the feeling of satisfied vanity which at times had come to her when she saw her husband’s vassals—hers also by marriage if she had so willed it—grovel at her feet. A half-crazed desire to fly for safety deadened all other sensations, and her voice was dry and hoarse as she again ordered Garrassime to leave her presence, to hurry—only hurry—preparations for her departure.

Slowly the devoted man rose to his feet, and for an instant their eyes met like two blades naked for combat; then the servant lowered his gaze and, forcing himself to humility, bowed profoundly.

“I must obey,” he said, sorrowfully. “But Your Highness assuredly does not comprehend the evil that will be done—the anger of His Excellency, nor what the people are capable of if the sickness spreads, and stricken by panic, they feel themselves forsaken. We of the Castle cannot restrain them. They will break. I, Garrassime, know them well—although I am not of them. They will become uncontrollable—unrestrainable. I implore Your Highness not to decide anything in haste. God knows what they might be exasperated into doing—perhaps prevent Your Highness from leaving the place, and”—he added, desperately—“if Your Highness goes, they will feel—and justly so—that there is great danger: that they are lost.”

“But this is intolerable—unthinkable! Am I a prisoner here in my own Castle—prisoner of that mob of diseased brutes?”

She glanced affrightedly around her at the ancient tapestries shadowing the thick walls with uncouth figures, at the grim effigies in knightly mail that with their tall lances so helplessly guarded the great room, and finally at the row of unshuttered windows slowly darkening to the night, and through which she saw a swift gleam of powdered snow, a mere haze of sifting atoms fine as dust, but which she knew might precede a tourmente.

“Ah, God!” she cried. “Is there no help for me? No one who can come and release me from this torture?”

Garrassime was staring—staring—staring at her in her now disheveled beauty, his lips slowly curling back from his sharp white teeth.

“The Duchess!” Laurence suddenly shrieked. “She is at Palitzinovna. Send for the Duchesse de Salvières. She will know how to deal with this. She may still come in time. Surely she will not refuse to come! You don’t think she will refuse, Garrassime?”

“No, she will not refuse to come,” Garrassime assured her in a deep, extra-guttural voice. “But will it be well, Excellency, if it be found out afterward that Your Highness cannot manage her own people; that only our own born Princess, one of our House, can do this easy deed?”

“Easy deed?” exclaimed Laurence. “Easy deed? Besides, what does it matter to me? I will have nothing to do with the people, I tell you! What do you think I care about what these savages think or don’t think? The Duchess may do so, but the Duchess belongs here, not I! Let her come, and I will go. I have had enough—enough of this awful country and its awful ways. Send for her. Tell the women to pack up my things at once. Prepare Prince Piotr. We go, I tell you—we go—at once!”

“No!”

At the sudden cry both Laurence and Garrassime turned with one impulse to face the gallant little figure in Russian-green velvet bounding in from the next salon.

“No!” again repeated the childish voice. “I have heard! I was looking for Garrassime. I will not go and leave the sick people alone. Papa is away, and now I am the Prince!”

The boy’s dark eyes were glowing, and with his little flushed face thrust excitedly forward, his baby speech suddenly clear and masterful, in spite of his short five years of life, he looked every inch what he claimed to be—the master in his father’s absence.

A silent laugh swept over Garrassime’s severe features, but he said nothing.

“You wretched child!” shrieked Laurence, sweeping forward as she spoke. “Carry him to his room, Garrassime, this instant. Well, this is the climax!”

“Don’t you touch me, Garrassime—and, mother, you keep off.” Two small fists shot out in defense, and, quivering all over, Piotr stood his ground.

With a choking gasp Laurence paused. This was the last straw for nerves wire-drawn with boredom, and now frayed out by fear. “Do what you like with him, Garrassime, but send immediately for the Duchess,” she cried, and, gathering her long train under her arm, she fled before the unspoken contempt of the servant, the hatred in her son’s eyes—fled by the nearest door, running straight before her, and as fast as she could.