the Russian woman gallantly and disappeared in the rear of them.

The group walked on in nervous silence, the two women now in the lead. When they reached a deserted spot the youth suddenly flushed a violent red, and, thrusting out his finely chiselled chin at his mother, he said, in quick pugnacious full-toned accents as out of keeping with his boyish figure as his hat:

“Mother, you are not going to keep up acquaintance with a person who has offered an insult to our Czar.”

“Paul! What has come over you?” the countess stammered out, colouring abjectly as she paused.

“I mean just what I say, mother.”

The elderly little man by his side looked on sheepishly, the cold sweat standing in beads on his forehead.

[5]

[5]

“Don’t mind this wild boy, I beg of you,” Anna Nicolayevna said to the Polish woman. “Don’t pay the least attention to him. He imagines himself a full grown man, but he is merely a silly boy and he gives me no end of trouble. Don’t take it ill, ma chère.” She rattled it off in a great flurry of embarrassment, straining the boy back tenderly, while she was condemning him.

“I don’t take it ill at all,” Pani Oginska answered tremulously. “He’s perfectly right. Your acquaintance has been a great pleasure to me, countess, but I can see that my company at this place would be very inconvenient to you. Adieu!”

She walked off toward a row of new cottages, and Anna Nicolayevna, the countess, stood gazing after her like one petrified.

“You are a savage, Pasha,” she whispered, in Russian.

“Why am I? I have done what is right, and you feel it as well as I do,” he returned hotly, in his sedate, compact, combative voice, looking from her to his teacher. When he was excited he sputtered out his sentences in volleys, growling at his listener and seemingly about to flounce off. This was the way he spoke now. “Why am I a savage? Can you afford to associate with a woman who will behave in this impudent, in this 

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