icence. He gave few confidences and asked none, as
is the habit of Englishmen.

"Well," he said, "I do not suppose he will stay long at Thors, and I
know that he will not stay at all at Osterno. Besides, what harm can he
actually do to us? He cannot well go about making enquiries. To begin
with, he knows no Russian."

"I doubt that," put in Steinmetz.

"And, even if he does, he cannot come poking about in Osterno. Catrina
will give him no information. Maggie hates him. You and I know him.
There is only the countess."

"Who will tell him all she knows! She would render that service to a
drosky driver."

Paul shrugged his shoulders.

There was no mention of Etta. They stood side by side, both thinking of
her, both looking at her, as she skated with De Chauxville. There lay
the danger, and they both knew it. But she was the wife of one of them
and their lips were necessarily sealed.

"And it will be permitted," Claude de Chauxville happened to be saying
at that moment, "that I call and pay my respects to an exiled princess?"

"There will be difficulties," answered Etta, in that tone which makes it
necessary to protest that difficulties are nothing under some
circumstances--the which De Chauxville duly protested with much fervor.

"You think that twenty miles of snow would deter me," he said.

"Well, they might."

"They might if--well--"

He left the sentence unfinished--the last resource of the sneak and the
coward who wishes to reserve to himself the letter of the denial in the
spirit of the meanest lie.

CHAPTER XXIV

HOME

A tearing, howling wind from the north--from the boundless snow-clad
plains of Russia that lie between the Neva and the Yellow Sea; a gray
sky washed over as with a huge brush dipped in dirty whitening; and the
plains of Tver a spotless, dazzling level of snow.

The snow was falling softly and steadily, falling, as it never falls in
England, in little more than fine powder, with a temperature forty
degrees below freezing-point. A drift--constant, restless, never
altering--sped over the level plain like the dust on a high-road before
a steady wind. This white scud--a flying scud of frozen water--was
singularly like the scud that is blown from the crest of the waves by a
cyclone in the China Seas. Any object that broke the wind--a stunted
pine, a broken tree-trunk, a Government road-post--had at its leeward
side a high, narrow snow-drift tailing off to the dead level of the