knees, looking up into her face
with his gray, kindly, caressing eyes. Timidly, doubtfully, he would
approach her every day as if he were meeting her for the first time and
feared a repulse. He would kiss her softly, delicately, with hushed
reserve, as if she were a fragile jewel that might break beneath his
tenderest caress. Poor Selivestroff! Leonora had wept at the thought of
him. In Russia and with princely Russian sumptuousness, they had lived
for a year in his castle, in the country, among a population of sodden
_moujiks_ who worshipped that beautiful woman in the white and blue furs
as devotedly as if she had been a Virgin stepping forth from the gilded
background of an ikon.

But Leonora could not live away from stageland: the ladies of the rural
aristocracy avoided her, and she needed applause and admiration. She
induced Selivestroff to move to St. Petersburg, and for a whole winter
she sang at the Opera there, like a grand dame turned opera singer out
of love for the work.

Once more she became the reigning _belle_. All the young Russian
aristocrats who held commissions in the Imperial Guard, or high posts in
the Government, spoke enthusiastically of the great Spanish beauty; and
they envied Selivestroff. The count yearned moodily for the solitude of
his castle, which held so many loving memories for him. In the bustling,
competitive life of the capital, he grew jealous, sad, melancholy,
irritable at the necessity of defending his love. He could sense the
underground warfare that was being waged against him by Leonora's
countless admirers.

One morning she was rudely awakened and leapt out of bed to find the
count stretched out on a divan, pale, his shirt stained with blood. A
number of gentlemen dressed in black were standing around him. They had
just brought him in from a carriage. He had been wounded in the chest.
The evening before, on leaving the theatre, the count had gone up for a
moment to his Club. He had caught an allusion to Leonora and himself in
some words of a friend. There had been blows--then hasty arrangements
for a duel, which had been fought at sunrise, with pistols. Selivestroff
died in the arms of his mistress, smiling, seeking those delicate,
powerful, pearly hands for one last time with his bleeding lips. Leonora
mourned him deeply, truly. The land where she had been so happy with the
first man she had really loved became intolerable to her, and abandoning
most of the riches that the