le who appear
nervous often rise to the occasion.

"I do not know what I meant," she said; "I do not know. You must not ask
me. It slipped out when I was not thinking. Oh! please be generous, and
do not ask me."

By some instinct she had leaped to the right mark. She had asked a
Bukaty to be generous.

"Some day," he said, "I will ask you."

And he walked with her to the gate of the gardens in silence.

XXVII

A SACRIFICE

Though the fine weather did not last, it was a promise of better things,
like the letter that precedes a welcome friend. After it the air seemed
warmer, though snow fell again, and the thermometer went below zero.

Wanda and her father did not return to Warsaw as they had intended.

So long as the frost holds, the country is endurable; nay, it is better
than the towns on those great plains of eastern Europe; but when the
thaw comes, and each small depression is a puddle, every low-lying field
a pond, and whole plains become lakes, few remain in the villages who
can set their feet upon the pavement. The early spring, so closely
associated in most minds with the song of birds and the budding of green
things, is in Poland and Russia a period of waiting for the water to
drain off the flat land; a time to look to one's thickest top-boots in
these countries, where men and women are booted to the knee, and every
third house displays the shoemaker's sign upon its door-post.

The Bukatys' country-house, like all else that the past had left
them, was insignificant. In olden days it had been a farm, one of the
smallest, used once or twice during the winter as a shooting-lodge; for
it stood in the midst of vast forests. It was not really ancient, for
it had been built in the days of Sobieski, when that rough warrior and
parvenu king built himself the house in the valley of the Vistula,
where he saw all his greatness vanish, and ended his days in that grim
solitude which is the inheritance of master-minds. The hand of the
French architect is to be detected even in this farm; for Poland,
more frankly and consciously than the rest of the world, drew all her
inspiration and her art from France. Did not France once send her a
king? Was not Sobieski's wife a Frenchwoman, who, moreover, ruled that
great fighter with her little finger, stronger than any rod of iron? If
ever a Frenchman was artificially made from other racial materials, he
was the last king of Poland, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski.

B