He saw her eyes light up, her breast heave with a sudden sigh. Something like a smile wavered for a moment beneath his waxed mustache.

Catrina's fingers, supple and strong, struck in great chords the air of a gloomy march from the half-forgotten muse of some monastic composer.

While she played, Claude de Chauxville proceeded with his delicate touch to play on the hidden chords of an untamed heart.

"A man's privilege," he repeated musingly.

"Need it be such?" she asked.

For the first time his eyes met hers.

"Not necessarily," he answered, and her eyes dropped before his narrow gaze.

He sat back in his chair, content for the moment with the progress he had made. He glanced at the countess. He was too experienced a man to be tricked. The countess was really asleep. Her cap was on one side, her mouth open. A woman who is pretending to sleep usually does so in becoming attitudes.

De Chauxville did not speak again for some minutes. He sat back in his chair, leaning his forehead on his hand, while he peeped through his slim fingers. He could almost read the girl's thoughts as she put them into music.

"She does not hate him yet," he was reflecting. "But she needs only to see him with Etta a few times and she will come to it."

The girl played on, throwing all the pain in her passionate, untamed heart into the music. She knew nothing of the world; for half of its temptations, its wiles, its wickednesses were closed to her by the plain face that God had given her. For beautiful women see the worst side of human nature--they usually deal with the worst of men. Catrina was an easy tool in the hands of such as Claude de Chauxville; for he had dealt with women and that which is evil in women all his life, and the only mistakes he ever made were those characteristic errors of omission attaching to a persistent ignorance of the innate good in human nature.

It is this same innate good that upsets the calculations of most villains.

Absorbed as she was in her great grief, Catrina was in no mood to seek for motives--to split a moral straw. She only knew that this man seemed to understand her as no one had ever understood her. She was content with the knowledge that he took the trouble to express and to show a sympathy of which those around her had not suspected her to be in need.

The moment had been propitious, and Claude de Chauxville, with true Gallic insight, had seized it. Her heart was sore and lonely--almost breaking--and she was without the worldly wisdom which tells us that such hearts must, at all costs, be hidden from the world. She was without religious teaching--quite without that higher moral teaching which is independent of creed and conformity, which is only learnt at a good mother's knee. Catrina had not had a good mother. She had had the countess--a weak-minded, self-indulgent, French-novel-reading woman.

Heaven protect our children from such mothers!

In the solitude of her life Catrina Lanovitch had conceived a great love--a passion such as a few only are capable of attaining, be it for weal or woe. She had seen this love ignored--walked under foot by its object with a grave deliberation which took her breath away when she thought of it. It was all in all to her; to him it was nothing. Her philosophy was simple. She could not sit still and endure. At this time it seemed unbearable. She must turn and rend some one. She did not know whom. But some one must suffer. It was in this that Claude de Chauxville proposed to assist her.

"It is preposterous that people should make others suffer and go unpunished," he said, intent on his noble purpose.

Catrina's eyelids flickered, but she made no answer. The soreness of her heart had not taken the form of a definite revenge as yet. Her love for Paul was still love, but it was perilously near to hatred. She had not reached the point of wishing definitely that he should suffer, but the sight of Etta--beautiful, self-confident, carelessly possessive in respect to Paul--had brought her within measurable distance of it.

"The arrogance of those who have all that they desire is insupportable,"

the Frenchman went on in his favorite, non-committing, epigrammatic way.

Catrina--a second Eve--glanced at him, and her silence gave him permission to go on.

"Some men have a different code of honor for women, who are helpless."

Catrina knew vaguely that unless a woman is beloved by the object of her displeasure, she cannot easily make him suffer.

She clenched her teeth over her lower lip. As she played, a new light was dawning in her eyes. The music was a marvel, but no one in the room heard it.

"I would be pitiless to all such men," said De Chauxville. "They deserve no pity, for they have shown none. The man who deceives a woman is worthy of--"

He never finished the sentence. Her deep, passionate eyes met his. Her hands came down with one final crash on the chords. She rose and crossed the room.

"Mother," she said, "shall I ring for tea?"

When the countess awoke, De Chauxville was turning over some sheets of music at the piano.

CHAPTER XXIII

A WINTER SCENE

Between Petersburg and the sea there are several favorite islands more or less assigned to the foreigners residing in the Russian capital. Here the English live, and in summer the familiar cries of the tennis-lawn may be heard, while in winter snow-shoeing, skating, and tobogganing hold merry sway.

It was here, namely, on the island of Christeffsky, that a great ice fete was held on the day preceding the departure of the Howard Alexis household for Tver. The fete was given by one of the foreign ambassadors--a gentleman whose wife was accredited to the first place in Petersburg society. It was absolutely necessary, Steinmetz averred, for the whole Howard Alexis party to put in an appearance.

The fete was supposed to begin at four in the afternoon, and by five o'clock all St. Petersburg--all, c'est a dire, worthy of mention in that aristocratic city--had arrived. One may be sure Claude de Chauxville arrived early, in beautiful furs with a pair of silver-plated skates under his arm. He was an influential member of the Cercle des Patineurs in Paris. Steinmetz arrived soon after, to look on, as he told his many friends. He was, he averred, too stout to skate and too heavy for the little iron sleds on the ice-hills.

"No, no!" he said, "there is nothing left for me but to watch. I shall watch De Chauxville," he added, turning to that graceful skater with a grim smile. De Chauxville nodded and laughed.

"You have been doing that any time this twenty years, mon ami," he said, as he stood upright on his skates and described an easy little figure on the outside edge backward.

"And have always found you on slippery ground."

"And never a fall," said De Chauxville over his shoulder, as he shot away across the brilliantly lighted pond.

It was quite dark. A young moon was rising over the city, throwing out in dark relief against the sky a hundred steeples and domes. The long, thin spire of the Fortress Church--the tomb of the Romanoffs--shot up into the heavens like a dagger. Near at hand, a thousand electric lights and colored lanterns, cunningly swung on the branches of the pines, made a veritable fairyland. The ceaseless song of the skates, on ice as hard as iron, mingled with the strains of a band playing in a kiosk with open windows. From the ice-hills came the swishing scream of the iron runners down the terrific slope. The Russians are a people of great emotions.

There is a candor in their recognition of the needs of the senses which does not obtain in our self-conscious nature. These strangely constituted people of the North--a budding nation, a nation which shall some day overrun the world--are easily intoxicated. And there is a deliberation about their methods of seeking this enjoyment which appears at times almost brutal. There is nothing more characteristic than the ice-hill.

Imagine a slope as steep as a roof, paved with solid blocks of ice, which are subsequently frozen together by flooding with water; imagine a sledge with steel runners polished like a knife; imagine a thousand lights on either side of this glittering path, and you have some idea of an ice-hill. It is certainly the strongest form of excitement imaginable--next, perhaps, to whale-fishing.

There is no question of breathing, once the sledge has been started by the attendant. The sensation is somewhat suggestive of a fall from a balloon, and yet one goes to the top again, as surely as the drunkard will return to his bottle. Fox-hunting is child's play to it, and yet grave men have prayed that they might die in pink.

Steinmetz was standing at the foot of the ice-hill when an arm was slipped within his.

"Will you take me down?" asked Maggie Delafield.

He turned and smiled at her--fresh and blooming in her furs.

"No, my dear young lady. But thank you for suggesting it."

"Is it very dangerous?"

"Very. But I think you ought to try it. It is a revelation. It is an epoch in your life. When I was a younger man I used to sneak away to an ice-hill where I was not known, and spend hours of the keenest enjoyment. Where is Paul?"

"He has just gone over there with Etta."

"She refuses to go?"

"Yes," answered Maggie.