le
with real grief. Was it not real grief, then, that he was suffering now?
For weeks he lived in the blackness that was horrible to those who
watched him. And finally Piotr, who dared anything for his master, sent,
secretly, for Kashkine--whom he believed endowed with miraculous powers
wherever his Prince was concerned. But for once Kashkine's presence
seemed powerless to rouse the composer from his lassitude: a feat which
was eventually accomplished by one who knew him more intimately than any
man.

It was now many years since his cousin and true companion first began to
make her deeply affectionate study of Ivan's moods. In May, according to
a former custom, Nathalie came down to Maidonovo, unaccompanied by her
daughters. And Kashkine, after watching her during one day and night,
retreated, gallantly leaving the field to her. It was one of the few
times on which she came alone to Ivan's home; and her excuse for the act
was one newly characteristic of her:

"My dear Ivan, I am forty-four years old: a safe age, if ever woman is
to attain to one. I now, therefore, insist upon the comfort of personal
freedom. It is the one compensation permitted for the loss of the youth
which can make freedom dangerous."

Ivan's reply to the theory was a smile. For neither by him nor by
herself could the graceful, beautifully groomed, _chic_ little woman
possibly have been regarded as she chose to describe herself. At the
same time, it would have been a person utterly beyond the pale who would
have admitted the possibility of impropriety in the behavior of the
Princess Feodoreff, one of the greatest ladies of Petersburg. She had
long since recovered any ground lost during the few months of her
separation from her dissolute Prince. And within the last eighteen
months rather a signal honor had been offered her in the intimate
friendship of the Grand-Duchess Catharine:--most irreproachable,
unapproachable, and, at the same time, most popular, of the imperial
women of Russia. Perhaps her friendship with this Princess was the more
genuine and the more truly sympathetic in that, as she was well aware,
her own history and that of her Imperial Highness bore many points of
resemblance. For the great-granddaughter of Constantine the Abdicator
was the wife of one of the most dissolute of the Grand-Dukes, whose
abuses of manhood no ingenuity of his proud wife was able to conceal.
Hence Nathalie, herself so intimately acquainted with this poignan