Pathetic, aye, pathetic--with a grin
behind the pathos, as there ever is.

She sat down at the piano, and her strong, small hands tore the heart
out of each wire. There are some people who get farther into a piano
than others, making the wires speak as with a voice. Catrina Lanovitch
had this trick. She only played a Russian people-song--a simple lay such
as one may hear issuing from the door of any kabak on a summer evening.
But she infused a true Russian soul into it--the soul that is cursed
with a fatal power of dumb and patient endurance. She did not sway from
side to side as do some people who lose themselves in the intoxication
of music. But she sat quite upright, her sturdy, square shoulders
motionless. Her strange eyes were fixed with the stillness of distant
contemplation.

Suddenly she stopped and leaped to her feet. She did not go to the
window, but stood listening beside the piano. The beat of a horse's
hoofs on the narrow road was distinctly audible, hollow and sodden as is
the sound of a wooden road. It came nearer and nearer, and a certain
unsteadiness indicated that the horse was tired.

"I thought he might have come," she whispered, and she sat down
breathlessly.

When the servant came into the room a few minutes later Catrina was at
the piano.

"A letter, mademoiselle," said the maid.

"Lay it on the table," answered Catrina, without looking round. She was
playing the closing bars of a nocturne.

She rose slowly, turned, and seized the letter as a starving man seizes
food. There was something almost wolf-like in her eyes.

"Steinmetz," she exclaimed, reading the address. "Steinmetz. Oh! why
won't he write to me?"

She tore open the letter, read it, and stood holding it in her hand,
looking out over the trackless pine-woods with absorbed, speculative
eyes. The sun had just set. The farthest ridge of pine-trees stood out
like the teeth of a saw in black relief on the rosy sky. Catrina
Lanovitch watched the rosiness fade into pearly gray.

"Madame the Countess awaits mademoiselle for tea," said the maid's voice
suddenly, in the gloom of the door-way.

"I will come."

The village of Thors--twenty miles farther down the river Oster, twenty
miles nearer to the junction of that river with the Volga--was little
more than a hamlet in the days of which we write. Some day, perhaps, the
three hundred souls of Thors may increase and multiply--some day when
Russia is attacked by the railway fever. F