ungfrau! The hero thought
only of his love, or rather of the mission he had given himself to
bring back into the right path that poor little Sonia, so unconsciously
criminal, cast by sisterly devotion outside of the law, and outside of
human nature.

This was the motive that kept him at Interlaken, in the same hotel as
the Wassiliefs. At his age, with his air of a good papa, he certainly
could not dream of making that poor child love him, but he saw her so
sweet, so brave, so generous to all the unfortunates of her party, so
devoted to that brother whom the mines of Siberia had sent back to her,
his body eaten with ulcers, poisoned with verdigris, and he himself
condemned to death by phthisis more surely than by any court. There was
enough in all that to touch a man!

Tartarin proposed to take them to Tarascon and settle them in a villa
full of sun at the gates of the town, that good little town where it
never rains and where life is spent in fetes and song. And with that
he grew excited, rattled a tambourine air on the crown of his hat, and
trolled out the gay native chorus of the farandole dance:

Lagadigadeou
La Tarasque, la Tarasque,
Lagadigadeou
La Tarasque de Casteou.

But while a satirical smile pinched still closer the lips of the sick
man, Sonia shook her head. Neither fetes nor sun for her so long as the
Russians groaned beneath the yoke of the tyrant. As soon as her brother
was well--her despairing eyes said another thing--nothing could prevent
her from returning up there to suffer and die in the sacred cause.

"But, _coquin de bon sort!_" cried Tartarin, "if you blow up one tyrant
there 'll come another... You will have it all to do over again... And
the years will go by, _ve!_ the days for happiness and love..." His way
of saying love--_amour_--a la Tarasconese, with three r's in it and his
eyes starting out of his head, amused the young girl; then, serious
once more, she declared she would never love any man but the one who
delivered her country. Yes, that man, were he as ugly as Bolibine, more
rustic and common than Manilof, she was ready to give herself wholly to
him, to live at his side, a free gift, as long as her youth lasted and
the man wished for her.

"Free gift!" the term used by Nihilists to express those illegal unions
they contract among themselves by reciprocal consent. And of such
primitive marriage Sonia spoke tranquilly with her virgin air before the
T