e Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before
Shamohin and said with the expression of a naughty, fretful child:

"Jean, your birdie's been sea-sick."

Afterwards when I was at Yalta I saw the same beautiful lady dashing
about on horseback with a couple of officers hardly able to keep
up with her. And one morning I saw her in an overall and a Phrygian
cap, sketching on the sea-front with a great crowd admiring her a
little way off. I too was introduced to her. She pressed my hand
with great warmth, and looking at me ecstatically, thanked me in
honeyed cadences for the pleasure I had given her by my writings.

"Don't you believe her," Shamohin whispered to me, "she has never
read a word of them."

When I was walking on the sea-front in the early evening Shamohin
met me with his arms full of big parcels of fruits and dainties.

"Prince Maktuev is here!" he said joyfully. "He came yesterday with
her brother, the spiritualist! Now I understand what she was writing
to him about! Oh, Lord!" he went on, gazing up to heaven, and
pressing his parcels to his bosom. "If she hits it off with the
prince, it means freedom, then I can go back to the country with
my father!"

And he ran on.

"I begin to believe in spirits," he called to me, looking back.
"The spirit of grandfather Ilarion seems to have prophesied the
truth! Oh, if only it is so!"

----

The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamohin's story
ended I don't know.

POLINKA

IT is one o'clock in the afternoon. Shopping is at its height at
the "Nouveaute's de Paris," a drapery establishment in one of the
Arcades. There is a monotonous hum of shopmen's voices, the hum one
hears at school when the teacher sets the boys to learn something
by heart. This regular sound is not interrupted by the laughter of
lady customers nor the slam of the glass door, nor the scurrying
of the boys.

Polinka, a thin fair little person whose mother is the head of a
dressmaking establishment, is standing in the middle of the shop
looking about for some one. A dark-browed boy runs up to her and
asks, looking at her very gravely:

"What is your pleasure, madam?"

"Nikolay Timofeitch always takes my order," answers Polinka.

Nikolay Timofeitch, a graceful dark young man, fashionably dressed,
with frizzled hair and a big pin in his cravat, has already cleared
a place on the counter and is craning forward, looking at Polinka
with a smile.