rsonage as
Madame Dravikine.

Thus, when her nephew presented himself before her, Countess Caroline's
heart gave a great throb of welcome and of pity; but her impassive face
grew only a little colder, and, though in the first seconds of looking
into the eyes of Sophia's son, hearing the familiar, inherited tricks of
her sister's speech, she was betrayed into the suggestion of a genuine
frankness, she soon bethought herself of an imminent danger which both
were in; and she instantly set herself to drive him from the house at
the earliest moment. For the Countess had been momentarily expecting her
daughter, who was to come to tea this afternoon; and for many reasons
she dared not permit those two to meet again. Therefore poor Ivan found
himself treated to a succession of monosyllables so chilling that there
rose up in him, first, a great wave of bitter disappointment and grief;
and then a hot anger that held him immovable in his seat, in the face of
a now open attack of rudeness such as few women and no man had ever
before endured from this experienced _mondaine_. At last, seeing that,
while he gained nothing, he was probably losing much by his persistence,
he rose, restrained, by an effort, any expression of the fury that his
aunt read plainly in his eyes, and left her. Nor did he ever know that
during the last fifteen minutes of his stay Nathalie,--Nathalie, her
dear face lined with grief and care, her beautiful eyes faded and dull
from long bodily pain and the mental anguish that has passed the bounds
of tears,--Nathalie, big with child for the third successive autumn of
her wretched married life--had sat not twelve feet from him, overhead,
in her mother's boudoir. For there she had retreated, on learning that
madame was entertaining a young man who was not an _habitue_ of the
house, and whose name had not been given for announcement.

Still Ivan's visit had not been wholly fruitless. He had elicited what
he had chiefly wished to learn. Unconsciously, because the subject was
the present burden of her nights and days, Caroline had betrayed the
fact of her daughter's unhappiness. Yet she would have maintained, and
truly, that she had not permitted three sentences to pass her lips on
the subject of the Princess Feodoreff. But the acuteness of the
_mondaine_ pales before that of the lover. Caroline knew nothing of what
Ivan took away with him; nor dreamed that, from this hour, Nathalie's
load became the secret burden of a