or did yet his astonishing charm always softened her irritation toward
his fecklessness. So she repeated more gently:

"What then?"

Mimo got up and flung out his arms in a dramatic way.

"It cannot be!" he said. "I must sell the 'Apache!' Besides, if I don't:
I tell you these strange, gray fogs are giving me new, wonderful
thoughts--dark, mysterious--two figures meeting in the mist! Oh! but a
wonderful combination that will be successful in all cases."

Mirko pressed his arm round his sister's neck and kissed her cheek,
while he cooed love words in a soft Slavonic language. Two big tears
gathered in Zara Shulski's deep eyes and made them tender as a dove's.

She drew out her purse and counted from it two sovereigns and some
shillings which she slipped into Mirko's small hand.

"Keep these, pet, for an emergency," she said. "They are all I have, but
I will--I must--find some other way for you soon: and now I shall have
to go. If my uncle should suspect I am seeing you I might be powerless
to help further."

They walked with her to the Grosvenor Gate, and reluctantly let her
leave them; and then they watched her, as she sped across the road
between the passing taxi-cabs. When they saw the light from the opening
door and her figure disappearing between the tall servants who had come
to open it, the two poor, shabby figures walked on with a sigh, to try
to find an omnibus which would put them down somewhere near their dingy
bedroom in Neville Street, Tottenham Court Road. And as they reached the
Marble Arch there came on a sharp shower of icy rain.

Countess Shulski, however poorly dressed, was a person to whom servants
were never impertinent; there was something in her bearing which
precluded all idea of familiarity. It did not even strike Turner, or
James, that her clothes were what none of the housemaids would have
considered fit to wear when they went out. The remark the lordly Turner
made, as he arranged some letters on the hall table, was:

"A very haughty lady, James--quite a bit of the Master about her, eh?"

But she went on to the lift, slowly, and to her luxurious bedroom, her
heart full of pain and rage against fate. Here she sat down before the
fire, and, resting her chin on her two hands, gazed steadily into the
glowing coals.

What pictures did she see of past miseries there in the flames? Her
thoughts wandered right back to the beginning. The stern, peculiar
father, and the gloomy castle. The se