noble
features. Natacha was twenty. Heavy brown hair circled about er forehead
and was looped about her ears, which were half-concealed. Her profile
was clear-cut; her mouth was strong and revealed between red, firm lips
the even pearliness of her teeth. She was of medium height. In walking
she had the free, light step of the highborn maidens who, in primal
times, pressed the flowers as they passed without crushing them. But all
her true grace seemed to be concentrated in her eyes, which were deep
and of a dark blue. The impression she made upon a beholder was very
complex. And it would have been difficult to say whether the calm which
pervaded every manifestation of her beauty was the result of conscious
control or the most perfect ease.

She took down the guzla and handed it to Boris, who struck some
plaintive preliminary chords.

"What shall I sing?" she inquired, raising her father's hand from the
back of the sofa where he rested and kissing it with filial tenderness.

"Improvise," said the general. "Improvise in French, for the sake of our
guest."

"Oh, yes," cried Boris; "improvise as you did the other evening."

He immediately struck a minor chord.

Natacha looked fondly at her father as she sang:

"When the moment comes that parts us at the close of day,
when the Angel of Sleep covers you with azure wings;
"Oh, may your eyes rest from so many tears, and your oppressed
heart have calm;
"In each moment that we have together, Father dear, let our
souls feel harmony sweet and mystical;
"And when your thoughts may have flown to other worlds, oh, may
my image, at least, nestle within your sleeping eyes."

Natacha's voice was sweet, and the charm of it subtly pervasive. The
words as she uttered them seemed to have all the quality of a prayer and
there were tears in all eyes, excepting those of Michael Korsakoff, the
second orderly, whom Rouletabille appraised as a man with a rough heart
not much open to sentiment.

"Feodor Feodorovitch," said this officer, when the young girl's voice
had faded away into the blending with the last note of the guzla,
"Feodor Feodorovitch is a man and a glorious soldier who is able to
sleep in peace, because he has labored for his country and for his
Czar."

"Yes, yes. Labored well! A glorious soldier!" repeated Athanase
Georgevitch and Ivan Petrovitch. "Well may he sleep peacefully."

"Natacha sang like an angel," said Boris, the first or