earing her intellectual crown to offend his
fastidious taste. She was wholly artless in her love of books and of
discussing them; and nothing in their contents had disturbed the
sweetest innocence he had ever met. Of the little arts of coquetry she
was mistress by inheritance and much provocation, but her unawakened
inner life breathed the simplicity and purity of the elemental roses
that hovered about her in his thoughts. Her very unsusceptibility made
the game more dangerous; if it piqued him--and he aspired to be no more
than human--he either should have to marry her, or nurse a sore spot in
his conscience for the rest of his life; and for neither alternative
had he the least relish.

He dismissed the subject at last with an impatient shrug. Perhaps he
was a conceited ass, as his English friends would say; perhaps the
Governor would be more amenable than she had represented. No man could
forecast events. It was enough to be forearmed.

But his thoughts swung to a theme as little disburdening. His needs,
as he had confided to Concha, were very pressing. The dry or frozen
fish, the sea dogs, the fat of whales, upon which the employees of the
Company were forced to subsist in the least hospitable of climes, had
ravaged them with scorbutic diseases until their numbers were so
reduced by death and desertion that there was danger of depopulation
and the consequent bankruptcy of the Company. Since June of the
preceding year until his departure from New Archangel in the previous
month, he had been actively engaged in inspection of the Company's
holdings from Kamchatka to Sitka: reforming abuses, establishing
schools and libraries, conceiving measures to protect the fur-bearing
animals from reckless slaughter both by the promuschleniki and
marauding foreigners; punishing and banishing the worst offenders
against the Company's laws; encouraging the faithful, and sharing
hardships with them that sent memories of former luxuries and pleasures
scurrying off to the realms of fantasy. But his rule would be
incomplete and his efforts end in failure if the miserable Russians and
natives in the employ of the Company were not vitalized by proper food
and cheered with the hope of its permanence.

In Santiago's story of the Russian visitor's achievements and status
there was the common mingling of truth and fiction the exalted never
fail to inspire. Rezanov, although he had accomplished great ends
against greater odds, was