'Send the children to me,' she said when at last she rang for her women, and the children came. They had come in from their morning's ride on their small ponies in the Bois. They were very pretty in their velvet riding dresses, with their golden hair flowing over their shoulders; they were very gentle and had admirable manners; the little boy with his cap in his hand kissed his mother's fingers with an old-world grace. She drew them both towards her.

'Mes mignons,' she said, looking alternately at each of them, 'I want you to tell me something quite honestly; are you afraid of me, either of you?'

The young Otho, a very sensitive and chivalrous child, coloured to his hair and was silent; his sister Xenia, less timid and more communicative, answered for him and for herself: 'We are both of us—a little.'

The brows of Nadine contracted with a sudden sense of pain.

'Why?' she said imperiously.

The children did not reply; their small faces grew serious; they were not prepared to analyse what they felt.

'Do you mean,' she continued, 'that if you wished for anything you would sooner ask your father for it than you would ask me?'

The children nodded their heads silently. They had lost their colour. She saw that the interrogation alarmed them.

'Why?' she repeated, in a softer tone.

They were still silent; they could not really tell; they only knew that a certain sense of timidity and awe was always upon them in their mother's presence, that they never dared to laugh too loudly or ask a question twice before her. They loved her, and had the passionate admiration of childhood for that which is above it and incomprehensible to it, and she seemed to them more wonderful and beautiful than any other living creature, but there was a tinge of fear in their sense of her presence.

She read their unformed confused thoughts, and she felt a sharp reproach in their tacit confession.

Had she been so engrossed in the ice of her egotism, that she had never taken the trouble even to stoop and draw to her these young hesitating half-opened souls?

Had she been cold and careless even to them?

Enfants d'amour, nÉs d'une Étreinte!

she murmured as she kissed them with lips which trembled; had she been so little kind to them that even they feared her?

'Maman Était prÊte À pleurer,' murmured Xenia to her brother in amazed awe, as with their arms wound about each other they passed down the corridor to their own apartments.

Otho drew a long breath.

'Elle nous a embrassÉs, vois-tu,' he murmured, 'comme on embrasse les petits pauvres!'

'Les petits pauvres,' whom he had seen in the Tuileries or the Luxembourg gardens, kissed by their ragged mothers with eager tenderness on cold winter mornings, when perhaps the mothers had no food to give them except such fond caresses. Watching those happy hungry children, he had said more than once to his sister enviously, 'Si maman nous embrassait comme Ça!'

And then they had always kissed each other to make up for the caresses which they did not obtain.

And now she too had kissed them 'comme Ça!' They were not sure whether they had done something very wrong or something very good to move her so; one or the other they were sure it must have been.

As the children went from her presence a note was brought her which briefly announced that the Princess Lobow Gregorievna had arrived in Paris from Russia to consult some famous physician.

'As the vulture comes when there is death in the air,' she murmured with passion, as she tore the note in two. Must this mummied saint even change all the habits of her life and quit her country to be present here, when for the first time a rupture open and irrevocable had come between herself and Othmar, when in a few days' time, if it were not doing so already, all Paris would be speaking of the cause of their disunion!

All the vague dormant superstition which slumbered beneath her sceptical intelligence, made her see a fatal omen in this unlooked-for arrival of her bitterest enemy. More than once she had said in her heart, 'If ever I have misfortune, Lobow Gregorievna will be there to triumph in it.' And now she was there, within a few streets, residing in a religious house of Muscovite nuns, a dark still austere spectre, which seemed to her like the carrion bird which waits for those who die.

'Do I grow nervous and hysterical?' she asked herself in scorn.

She who had meted out destiny to so many, who had thought that it was only the timid and foolish who let life go ill with them, who had regarded the sorrows of sentiment and emotion with an indulgent contempt, felt with anger against herself that such a trivial thing as the advent of a woman who hated her could affect her nerves and appear to her a presage of ill. With her delicate scorn and her consummate indifference she had turned aside all the efforts of others to move her or influence her; she had never known either apprehension or regret; it had always seemed to her that life was a comedy to be played ill or well according as you were wise or stupid. Suddenly, for the first time, emotions which were beyond her own control affected her, and a sense that circumstance escaped her guidance filled her with the sharp pain of irritated impotence.

She knew the world too well not to know that all the women who had vainly envied her, and many of the men who had vainly wooed her, would take pleasure and find solace in every whisper which should tell them of the offence to her pride; and she knew the world too well not to know also that there is no such thing as privacy in it, that all which she had learned through Michel Obrenowitch society would find out and gossip exaggerate; and that the whole of the society throughout Europe which she had dominated and influenced and been feared by for so long, would know that she—she—NadÈge Feodorowna—was deserted for a peasant girl taken from the streets.

All the imperious blood which was in her changed to fire as she thought of the certain comments of the courts and drawing-rooms in which she had been so long so arrogant a leader, so dreaded a wit; she knew that eagerly as hounds at the curÉe would all her flatterers, friends, and lovers join her foes in exultantly rejoicing over her insulted dignity.

How many and many a time she had heard society laugh over just such a story as this! How well she knew all the cruel derision, all the gay contempt, all the equivocal jests, all the affected pity! How well she knew that precisely in measure to the homage which they yield us is the pleasure of others in our pain!