everything! What are you thinking of, Matrena Petrovna!' And he did
not speak to me after that for two days. It was only when he saw I was
growing very ill that he pardoned me, but he had to be plagued with my
jeremiads and the appealing looks of Natacha without end in his own
home each time we heard any shooting in the street. Natacha attended the
lectures of the Faculty, you know. And she knew many of them, and even
some of those who were being killed on the barricades. Ah, life was not
easy for him in his own home, the poor general! Besides, there was also
Boris, whom I love as well, for that matter, as my own child, because I
shall be very happy to see him married to Natacha--there was poor Boris
who always came home from the attacks paler than a corpse and who could
not keep from moaning with us."

"And Michael?" questioned Rouletabille.

"Oh, Michael only came towards the last. He is a new orderly to the
general. The government at St. Petersburg sent him, because of course
they couldn't help learning that Boris rather lacked zeal in repressing
the students and did not encourage the general in being as severe as was
necessary for the safety of the Empire. But Michael, he has a heart of
stone; he knows nothing but the countersign and massacres fathers and
mothers, crying, 'Vive le Tsar!' Truly, it seems his heart can only be
touched by the sight of Natacha. And that again has caused a good deal
of anxiety to Feodor and me. It has caught us in a useless complication
that we would have liked to end by the prompt marriage of Natacha and
Boris. But Natacha, to our great surprise, has not wished it to be so.
No, she has not wished it, saying that there is always time to think
of her wedding and that she is in no hurry to leave us. Meantime she
entertains herself with this Michael as if she did not fear his passion,
and neither has Michael the desperate air of a man who knows the
definite engagement of Natacha and Boris. And my step-daughter is not a
coquette. No, no. No one can say she is a coquette. At least, no one had
been able to say it up to the time that Michael arrived. Can it be
that she is a coquette? They are mysterious, these young girls, very
mysterious, above all when they have that calm and tranquil look that
Natacha always has; a face, monsieur, as you have noticed perhaps, whose
beauty is rather passive whatever one says and does, excepting when the
volleys in the streets kill her young comrades of the sc