"I wish to be near Alexis," added De Chauxville.

Catrina was staring straight in front of her. Her face had acquired a habit of hardening at the mention of Paul's name. It was stone-like now, and set. Perhaps she might have forgiven him if he had loved her once, if only for a little while. She might have forgiven him, if only for the remembrance of that little while. But Paul had always been a man of set purpose, and such men are cruel. Even for her sake, even for the sake of his own vanity, he had never pretended to love Catrina. He had never mistaken gratified vanity for dawning love, as millions of men do. Or perhaps he was without vanity. Some few men are so constructed.

"Do you love him so?" asked Catrina, with a grim smile distorting her strong face.

"As much as you, mademoiselle," replied De Chauxville.

Catrina started. She was not sure that she hated Paul. Toward Etta, there was no mistake in her feeling, and this was so strong that, like an electric current, there was enough of it to pass through the wife and reach the husband.

Passion, like character, does not grow in crowded places. In great cities men are all more or less alike. It is only in solitary abodes that strong natures grow up in their own way. Catrina had grown to womanhood in one of the solitary places of the earth. She had no facile axiom, no powerful precedent, to guide her every step through life. The woman who was in daily contact with her was immeasurably beneath her in mental power, in force of character, in those possibilities of love or hatred which go to make a strong life for good or for evil. By the side of her daughter the Countess Lanovitch was as the willow, swayed by every wind, in the neighborhood of the oak, crooked and still and strong.

"In Petersburg you pledged yourself to help me," said De Chauxville. And although she knew that in the letter this was false, she did not contradict him. "I came here to claim fulfilment of your promise."

The hard blue eyes beneath the fur cap stared straight in front of them.

Catrina seemed to be driving like one asleep, for she noted nothing by the roadside. So far as eye could reach over the snow-clad plain, through the silent pines, these two were alone in a white, dead world of their own. Catrina never drove with bells. There was no sound beyond the high-pitched drone of the steel runners over the powdery snow. They were alone; unseen, unheard save of that Ear that listens in the waste places of the world.

"What do you want me to do?" she asked.

"Oh, not very much!" answered De Chauxville--a cautious man, who knew a woman's humor. Catrina driving a pair of ponies in the clear, sharp air of Central Russia, and Catrina playing the piano in the enervating, flower-scented atmosphere of a drawing-room, were two different women.

De Chauxville was not the man to mistake the one for the other.

"Not very much, mademoiselle," he answered. "I should like Mme. la Comtesse to invite the whole Osterno party to dine, and sleep, perhaps, if one may suggest it."

Catrina wanted this too. She wanted to torture herself with the sight of Etta, beautiful, self-confident, carelessly cognizant of Paul's love.

She wanted to see Paul look at his wife with the open admiration which she had set down as something else than love--something immeasurably beneath love as Catrina understood that passion. Her soul, brooding under a weight of misery, was ready to welcome any change, should it only mean a greater misery.

"I can manage that," she said, "if they will come. It was a prearranged matter that there should be a bear-hunt in our forests."

"That will do," answered De Chauxville reflectively; "in a few days, perhaps, if it suits the countess."

Catrina made no reply. After a pause she spoke again, in her strange, jerky way.

"What will you gain by it?" she asked.

De Chauxville shrugged his shoulders.

"Who knows?" he answered. "There are many things I want to know; many questions which can be answered only by one's own observation. I want to see them together. Are they happy?"

Catrina's face hardened.

"If there is a God in heaven, and he hears our prayers, they ought not to be," she replied curtly.

"She looked happy enough in Petersburg," said the Frenchman, who never told the truth for its own sake. Whenever he thought that Catrina's hatred needed stimulation he mentioned Etta's name.

"There are other questions in my mind," he went on, "some of which you can answer, mademoiselle, if you care to."

Catrina's face expressed no great willingness to oblige.

"The Charity League," said De Chauxville, looking at her keenly; "I have always had a feeling of curiosity respecting it. Was, for instance, our friend the Prince Pavlo implicated in that unfortunate affair?"

Catrina flushed suddenly. She did not take her eyes from the ponies. She was conscious of the unwonted color in her cheeks, which was slowly dying away beneath her companion's relentless gaze.

"You need not trouble to reply, mademoiselle," said De Chauxville, with his dark smile; "I am answered."

Catrina pulled the ponies up with a jerk, and proceeded to turn their willing heads toward home. She was alarmed and disturbed. Nothing seemed to be safe from the curiosity of this man, no secret secure, no prevarication of the slightest avail.

"There are other questions in my mind," said De Chauxville quietly, "but not now. Mademoiselle is no doubt tired."

He leaned back, and when at length he spoke it was to give utterance to the trite commonplace of which he made a conversational study.

CHAPTER XXVIII

IN THE CASTLE OF THORS

A week later Catrina, watching from the window of her own small room, saw Paul lift Etta from the sleigh, and the sight made her clench her hands until the knuckles shone like polished ivory.

She turned and looked at herself in the mirror. No one knew how she had tried one dress after another since luncheon, alone in her two rooms, having sent her maid down stairs. No one knew the bitterness in this girl's heart as she contemplated her own reflection.

She went slowly down stairs to the long, dimly lighted drawing-room. As she entered she heard her mother's cackling voice.

"Yes, princess," the countess was saying, "it is a quaint old house; little more than a fortified farm, I know. But my husband's family were always strange. They seem always to have ignored the little comforts and elegancies of life."

"It is most interesting," answered Etta's voice, and Catrina stepped forward into the light.

Formal greetings were exchanged, and Catrina saw Etta look anxiously toward the door through which she had just come. She thought that she was looking for her husband. But it was Claude de Chauxville for whose appearance Etta was waiting.

Paul and Steinmetz entered at the same moment by another door, and Catrina, who was talking to Maggie in English, suddenly stopped.

"Ah, Catrina," said Paul, "we have broken new ground for you. There was no track from here to Osterno through the forest. I made one this afternoon, so you have no excuse for remaining away, now."

"Thank you," answered Catrina, withdrawing her cold hand hurriedly from his friendly grasp.

"Miss Delafield," went on Paul, "admires our country as much as you do."

"I was just telling mademoiselle," said Maggie, speaking French with an honest English accent.

Paul nodded, and left them together.

"Yes," the countess was saying at the other end of the gloomy room; "yes, we are greatly attached to Thors: Catrina, perhaps, more than I. I have some happy associations, and many sorrowful ones. But then--mon Dieu!--how isolated we are!"

"It is rather far from--anywhere," acceded Etta, who was not attending, although she appeared to be interested.

"Far! Princess, I often wonder how Paris and Thors can be in the same world! Before our--our troubles we used to live in Paris a portion of the year. At least I did, while my poor husband travelled about. He had a hobby, you know, poor man! Humanity was his hobby. I have always found that men who seek to do good to their fellows are never thanked. Have you noticed that? The human race is not grateful en gros. There is a little gratitude in the individual, but none in the race."

"None," answered Etta absently.