down upon a
splendid world. They didn't agree with him at the Embassy, but he
could not get rid of the notion.

The girl saw his sudden abstraction.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked. It had been her favourite
question as a child.

"I was thinking that I rather wished you were still in Paris."

"But why?"

"Because I think you would be safer."

"Oh, what nonsense, Quentin dear! Where should I be safe if not in my
own Russia, where I have friends--oh, so many, and tribes and tribes of
relations? It is France and England that are unsafe with the German
guns grumbling at their doors.... My complaint is that my life is too
cosseted and padded. I am too secure, and I do not want to be secure."

The young man lifted a heavy casket from a table at his elbow. It was
of dark green imperial jade, with a wonderfully carved lid. He took
off the lid and picked up three small oddments of ivory--a priest with
a beard, a tiny soldier, and a draught-ox. Putting the three in a
triangle, he balanced the jade box on them.

"Look, Saskia! If you were living inside that box you would think it
very secure. You would note the thickness of the walls and the
hardness of the stone, and you would dream away in a peaceful green
dusk. But all the time it would be held up by trifles--brittle
trifles."

She shook her head. "You do not understand. You cannot understand. We
are a very old and strong people with roots deep, deep in the earth."

"Please God you are right," he said. "But, Saskia, you know that if I
can ever serve you, you have only to command me. Now I can do no more
for you than the mouse for the lion--at the beginning of the story. But
the story had an end, you remember, and some day it may be in my power
to help you. Promise to send for me."

The girl laughed merrily. "The King of Spain's daughter," she quoted,

"Came to visit me,
And all for the love
Of my little nut-tree."

The other laughed also, as a young man in the uniform of the
Preobrajenski Guards approached to claim the girl. "Even a nut-tree
may be a shelter in a storm," he said.

"Of course I promise, Quentin," she said. "Au revoir. Soon I will
come and take you to supper, and we will talk of nothing but nut-trees."

He watched the two leave the room, her gown glowing like a tongue of
fire in that shadowy archway. Then he slowly rose to his feet, for he
thought that for a little he would watch the dancing. Something m