sisters overhead twinkled in the deep gloom of
the sky, and she soon looked away from them, back to the gleaming earth
in its radiant mantle of ermine.

Nicolas hurried across the hall, turned the corner of the house, and
went past the side door where Sonia was to come out. Half-way to the
barn stacks of wood, in the full moonlight, threw their shadows on the
path, and beyond, an alley of lime-trees traced a tangled pattern on
the snow with the fine crossed lines of their leafless twigs. The beams
of the house and its snow-laden roof looked as if they had been hewn out
of a block of opal, with iridescent lights where the facets caught the
silvery moonlight. Suddenly a bough fell crashing off a tree in the
garden; then all was still again. Sonia's heart beat high with gladness;
as if she were drinking in not common air, but some life-giving elixir
of eternal youth and joy.

"Straight on, if you please, miss, and on no account look behind you."

"I am not afraid," said Sonia, her little shoes tapping the stone steps
and then crunching the carpet of snow as she ran to meet Nicolas, who
was within a couple of yards of her. And yet not the Nicolas of
every-day life. What had transfigured him so completely? Was it his
woman's costume with frizzed-out hair, or was it that radiant smile
which he so rarely wore, and which at this moment illumined his face?

"But Sonia is quite unlike herself, and yet she is herself," thought
Nicolas on his side, looking down at the sweet little face in the
moonlight. He slipped his arms under the fur cloak that wrapped her, and
drew her to him, and he kissed her lips, which still tasted of the
burned cork that had blackened her mustache.

"Nicolas--Sonia," they whispered; and Sonia put her little hands round
his face. Then, hand in hand, they ran to the barn and back, and each
went in by the different doors they had come out of.

Natacha, who had noted everything, managed so that she, Mme. Schoss, and
Dimmler should return in one sleigh, while the maids went with Nicolas
and Sonia in another. Nicolas was in no hurry to get home; he could not
help looking at Sonia and trying to find under her disguise the true
Sonia--his Sonia, from whom nothing now could ever part him. The magical
effects of moonlight, the remembrance of that kiss on her sweet lips,
the dizzy flight of the snow-clad ground under the horses' hoofs, the
black sky, studded with diamonds, that bent over their heads, the icy
ai