d nothing she could say would, he felt
sure of it, alter his fundamental distrust of Madame von Marwitz.

"I want to tell you about my life," said Karen, looking out at the sea
from between her hands. "You have heard my story, of course; people are
always told it; but you have never heard it from my side. You have heard
no doubt about my father and mother, and how she left the man she did
not love for him. My mother died when I was quite little; so, though I
remember her well she does not come into the part of my story that I
want to tell you. But I was thirteen years old when my father died, and
that begins the part that leads to Tante. It was in Rome, in winter when
he died; and I was alone with him; and there was no money, and I had
more to bear than a child's mind and heart should have. He died. And
then there were dreadful days. Cold, coarse people came and took me and
put me in a convent in Paris. That convent was like hell to me. I was so
miserable. And I had never known restraint or unkindness, and the French
girls, so sly and so small in their thoughts, were hateful to me. And I
did not like the nuns. I was punished and punished--rightly no doubt. I
was fierce and sullen, I remember, and would not obey. Then I heard, by
chance, from a girl whose family had been to her concert in Paris, that
Madame Okraska was with her husband at Fontainebleau. Of her I knew
nothing but the lovely face in the shop-windows. But her husband's name
brought back distant days to me. He had known my father; I remembered
him--the fair, large, kindly smiling, very sad man--in my father's
studio among the clay and marble. He bought once a little head my father
had done of me when I was a child. So I ran away from the convent--oh,
it was very bad; I knocked down a nun and escaped the portress, and hid
for a long time in the streets. And I made my way through Paris and
walked for a day and night to Fontainebleau; and there in the forest, in
the evening, I was lost, and almost dead with hunger and fatigue. And as
I stood by the road I saw the carriage approaching from very far away
and saw sitting in it, as it came nearer, the beautiful woman. Shall I
ever forget it? The dark forest and the evening sky above and her face
looking at me--looking, looking, full of pity and wonder. She has told
me that I was the most unhappy thing that she had ever seen. My father's
friend was with her; but though I saw him and knew that I was safe, I
had eyes o