melancholy and anguish. Interest in him was whetted by stories of his passion for Princess Dolgoruki, lady in waiting to the Czarina; so the women at the watering place tried to decipher the tale of his liaison in those sad amative eyes of his.

[3]

Two refined looking, middle-aged women attracted attention by the bizarre simplicity with which one of them was attired and coiffured. She was extremely pale and made one think of an insane asylum or a convent. She was grey, while her companion had auburn hair and was shorter and flabbier of figure. They were conversing in French, but it was not their native tongue. The one with the grey hair was Pani Oginska, a Polish woman; the other a Russian countess named Anna Nicolayevna Varova (Varoff). They had first met, in this watering place, less than a fortnight ago, when a chat, in the course of which they warmed to each other, led to the discovery that their estates lay in neighbouring provinces in Little Russia. They were preceded by a slender youth of eighteen in a broad-brimmed straw hat and a clean-shaven elderly little man in one of soft grey felt. These were Prince Pavel Alexeyevich Boulatoff, a son of the countess by a former marriage, and Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin, his private tutor, as well as one of his instructors at the gymnasium[A] of his native town. Pavel’s straw hat was too sedate for his childish face and was pushed down so low that a delicately sculptured chin and mouth and the turned up tip of a rudely hewn Russian nose was all one could see under its vast expanse of yellow brim. The old[4] man knew no German and this was his first trip abroad, so his high-born pupil, who had an advantage over him in both these respects, was explaining things to him, with an air at once patronising and respectful. Presently Pavel interrupted himself.

[4]

“The Czar!” he whispered, in a flutter. “The Czar!” he repeated over his shoulder, addressing himself to his mother.

Pievakin raised his glance, paling as he did so, but was so overawed by the sight that he forthwith dropped his eyes, a sickly expression on his lips.

When the men came face to face with their monarch they made way and snatched off their hats as if they were on fire. Countess Varoff, Pavel’s mother, curtseyed deeply, her flaccid insignificant little body retreating toward the side of the promenade and then sinking to the ground; while the Polish woman proceeded on her way stiffly without so much as a nod of her head. The Czar returned the greeting of 

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