every care and comfort.

[Illustration: MRS. MONA CAIRD.]

She was singularly reticent and self-possessed. In speaking, there was
no emotional emphasis, whatever she might be saying. The only comment on
her narrative that one could detect was an occasional touch of cold
scorn or irony. The more terrible the incident that she related, the
more quiet became her tones.

It seemed as if the flame of indignation had burnt itself out in the
years of suffering that she had passed through. The traces of those
years were in her face. Its very stillness and pallor seemed to tell
the tale of pain endured silently and in solitude for so long. It was
written, too, in the steadfast quality that expressed itself
in her whole bearing, and in the entire absence of any petty
self-consciousness. In spite of the awful nervous strain that she had
endured she had no little restless habits or movements of any kind.

One felt in her a vast reserve force and a dauntless courage. It was
courage of a kind that is almost terrible, for it accompanied a highly
organised and imaginative temperament, a nervous temperament, be it
observed, which implies _controlled_ and _ordered_, not _uncontrolled_
and _disordered_ nervous power. The half-hysterical persons who class
themselves among the possessors of this temperament are apt to overlook
that important distinction.

"Mademoiselle Sophie" gained none of her courage from insensitiveness.
Her whole life was dedicated to the cause of her country, and the
personal elements had been sacrificed to this object beyond herself: the
forlorn hope which has already claimed so many of the noblest and
bravest spirits in all the Tzar's dominions.

After "Mademoiselle Sophie" left that afternoon, I could not help
placing her in imagination beside the average woman that our own
civilisation has produced (not a fair comparison doubtless); and the
latter seemed painfully small in aim and motive, pitifully petty and
fussy and lacking in repose and dignity when compared with the calm
heroine of this Russian romance.

But human beings are the creations of their circumstances, and the
circumstances of a Western woman's life are not favourable to the
development of the grander qualities, though, indeed, they are often
harassing and bewildering, and cruel enough to demand heroism as great
even as that of "Mademoiselle Sophie." I think it would be salutary for
all of us--men as well as women of the West--to come more of