aware who _you_ are."

"Hush!" said the little Sonia, still smiling, but pointing with her
gloved finger to the seat beside the driver, where sat the tenor with
his sleeve-buttons, and another young Russian, sheltering themselves
under the same umbrella, and laughing and talking in Italian.

Between the police and the Nihilists, Tartarin did not hesitate.

"Do you know that man, _au mouain?_" he said in a low voice, putting
his head quite close to Sonia's fresh cheeks, and seeing himself in her
clear eyes, which suddenly turned hard and savage as she answered "yes,"
with a snap of their lids.

The hero shuddered, but as one shudders at the theatre, with that
delightful creeping of the epidermis which takes you when the action
becomes Corsican, and you settle yourself in your seat to see and to
listen more attentively. Personally out of the affair, delivered from
the mortal terrors which had haunted him all night and prevented him
from swallowing his usual Swiss coffee, honey, and butter, he breathed
with free lungs, thought life good, and this little Russian irresistibly
pleasing in her travelling hat, her jersey close to the throat, tight to
the arms, and moulding her slender figure of perfect elegance. And such
a child! Child in the candour of her laugh, in the down upon her cheeks,
in the pretty grace with which she spread her shawl upon the knees of
her poor brother. "Are you comfortable?.." "You are not cold?" How could
any one suppose that little hand, so delicate beneath its chamois glove,
had had the physical force and the moral courage to kill a man?

Nor did the others of the party seem ferocious: all had the same
ingenuous laugh, rather constrained and sad on the drawn lips of the
poor invalid, and noisy in Manilof, who, very young behind his bushy
beard, gave way to explosions of mirth like a schoolboy in his holidays,
bursts of a gayety that was really exuberant.

The third companion, whom they called Boli-bine, and who talked on the
box with the tenor, amused himself much and was constantly turning back
to translate to his friends the Italian's adventures, his successes
at the Petersburg Opera, his _bonnes fortunes_, the sleeve-buttons the
ladies had subscribed to present to him on his departure, extraordinary
buttons, with, three notes of music engraved thereon, _la do re_
(l'adore), which professional pun, repeated in the landau, caused such
delight, the tenor himself swelling up with pride and twir