54 MOTHS. disappear quickly and quietly, and heard a whisper run through the dancers of ' Tmsk,' and caught a look on some few faces that told you a tarantass was going out into the dark- ness, over the snow, full gallop,- with a political prisoner between his guards? Ah, it is horri- ble! When one has seen it, it makes one feel cold, even at noon in midsummer, to remem- ber it " "Russia is always terrible," said Vere, with a little shudder. "Nowhere on earth are there such ghastly contrasts: you live in a hot- house witli your palms, and the poor are all round you in the ice; everything is like that." "And yet you are Russian," said Corrèze, a little cruelly and bitterly: for he had never for- given her quick descent into her mother's toils, her quick acceptance of temptation. "You are certainly Russian. You are no longer Vere even: you are Princess Vera." " I am always Vere," she said, in alone tone. " They must "call me what they will, but it alters nothing." "And Vera is a good name, too," said Cor- rèze, bending his eyes almost sternly on hers. "It means Truth." " Yes; it means that." He glided into the grass at the foot of the tree, and sat there, leaning on his elbow, and lookiug towards her: it was the attitude in which she had seen him first upon the beach at TrouviUe. He was always graceful in all he did; the soft afternoon light was upon his face; he had thrown his broad felt hat on the grass; a stray sunbeam waudered in the bright brown of her hair. Vere glanced at him, and was about to speak, then hesitated,—paused,—at last unclosed her lips so long shut in silence. " You remember that you bade me keep my- self unspotted from the world?" she said, sud- denly, " I want to tell you that I strive always to do so; yes, I do. I was never ruled by am- bition and" vanity,—as you think. I cannot tell you more; but, if you understand me at all, you will understand that that is true." " I knew it without your telling me." He ceased to remember that ever he had'sus- pected her or ever reproached her. It was a mystery to him that this proud, strong, pure nature should have ever been brought low by any force; but he accepted the fact of it as men in their faith accept miracles. "She was such a child; who can tell what they did or said?" he mused, as an infinite ten- derness and compassion came over him. This woman was not twenty yet, and she had tasted all the deepest bitterness of life and all its out- rages of passion and of vice! She was to him Hke one of the young saints of old. on whom tyrants and torturers spent all the filth and fury of their will, yet could not touch the soul or break the courage of the thing that they dishonored. Women had not taught him reverence; he had found them frail when he had not found them base; but as great a reverence as ever moved Gawaine orSintram moved him towards Vere now. He feared to speak, lest he should offend her; it was hard to give her sympathy, even to give her comprehension, without seem- ing to offer her insult. He knew that she was too loyal to the man whose name she bore to bear to hear him blamed, with whatsoever jus- tice it might be. He was silent, while leaning on his arm and looking down upon the cups and scepters of the green moss on which he rested. If he looked up at her face he feared his strength of self- control would fail him and his lips be loosened. Vere bound together his wild flowers one by one. She longed for him to believe her guilt- less of the low ambitions of the world ; she could not bear that he should fancy that the low temptations of the world's wealth and rank had ever had power over her. Yet she was the wife of Sergius Zouroff. What could she hope to make him think in face sf that one fact? Suddenly he looked up at her; his brilliant «yes were dim with tears, yet flashed darkly with a somber indignation. " I understand,"he said, at last, his old habit of quick and eloquent speech returning to him. "I think I have always understood without words; I think all the world does. Aud that is why one half of it at least has no forgiveness for you. princess." He added the title with a little effort; it was as a curb on his memory, on his impulse; he set it as a barrier between him and her. " It is I who do not understand," said Vere, with a faint smile, and an accent of interroga- tion. She did not look away from the wood- flowers. His eyes fed themselves on the lines of her delicate and noble features; he breathed quickly; the color came into his face. "No, you do not understand," he said, rapidly. "There is your danger. There is your weakness. Do y'ou know what it costs to be an innocent woman in the world you live in?—the great world, as it calls itself, God help us. To be chaste in mind and body, thought and deed, to be innocent in soul and substance, not merely with sufficient absti- nence fiom evil not to endanger position, not merely with physical coldness that can deny the passions it is diverted to influence, but real chastity, real innocence, which recoils from the shadow of sin anil shrinks from the laughter of lust. Do you know what the cost of such is? I will tell you. Their cost is iso- lation; the sneer they are branded with is 'out of fashion :' no one will say it, perhaps, but all will make you feel it. If you be ashamed to go half clothed, if you be unwilling to laugh at innuendoes, if you be unable to understand an indecency in a"song, or a gag at a theater, if you do not find a charm in suggested filth, if you do not care to have loose women for your friends, however high may be their rank, if adultery look to you all the worse because it is a domestic pet and plaything, and if immoral- ity seem to you but the more shameful because it is romped with at the children's hour, danced with at the queen's ball, made a guest at the house-parties, and smuggled smiling y through the custom-officers of society,—if you be so be- hind your time as this, you insult your genera- tion ; you are a reproach to it, and an ennui. The union of society is a Camorra or Mafia. Those who are not of it must at least subscribe to it and smile ou it, or they are lost. There is your danger, my Princess of Truth. How can they forgive you, any one of them, the women, who have not your ioveliness and your mind, and to whom you are a perpetual, an uncon- scious, an inexorable rebuke? Clothed with in- nocence is metaphor and fact with you: and do you understand the women of your world so little yet as not to understand that they would pardon you the nakedness of vice much sooner than they ever will those stainless robes you share with the children and the angels?" He ceased; eloquence when he was moved was habitual as song had been to bim in his childhood when he had gathered his sheep and goats on the green alp. He paused abruptly, because, had he spoken more, he would have uttered words that could never have been re- called, words that would have been set forever between them like a gulf of flame. Vere had listened; her face had flushed a little, then had grown paler than was even usual to her. She understood well enough,—too well ; an intense sweetness and a vague shame came to her with his words,—the one that he should read her soul so clearly, the other that he should know her path so dark, her fate so hateful. She gathered the wood flowers together and rose. "I am far from the angels, and you think too well of me," she said, with a tremor in her voice. "I think the sun is setting; it grows late." Corrèze rose, with a sigh, to his feet, and raised her hat from the ground. "Yes. It will soon be dark,—very dark to me. Princess, will you think of what 1 said? will you be on your guard with your foes?" "Who are they?" " All women, most men. In a word, a world that is not fit for your footsteps." Vere was silent, thinking. " I have more courage than insight," she said, with a little smile, at last; "and it is easier to me to endure than to influence. I think I influ- ence no one. It must be my fault. They say I am wanting in sympathy." "Nay, the notes around you are too coarse to strike an echo from you: that is all. You have a perfect sympathy with all that is noble, but they never give you that." " Let us move quickly: the sun is set," she said, as she took her hat from him, and walked on down the forest road. Neither spoke. In a little time they had reached the sluices, where the imprisoned tim- bers lay awaiting the weekly rush of the walers. There a little low carriage with some mountain ponies, lent her by the court, was awaiting her. Keeping his wild blossoms of the forest in one hand, she gave him the other. "I shall see you to-morrow?" she asked, with the frank simplicity and directness of her nature. He hesitated a moment, then answered, "To- night I go up iuto the Thorstein ice-fields; we may be away some days; but when I come down from the mountains, yes; certainly yes, madame, I will have the honor of saluting you once more. And I will bring you some edel- weiss. It is the flower they call you after in Paris." "Do they? I did not know it. Adieu." Her little postilion, a boy from the Imperial stables, with a silver horn and a ribboned and tasseled dress, cracked his whip, and the ponies went away at a trot down towards the valley, whilst beyond, the last brightness of daylight was shining above the gray-white sheet of the Carl Eisfeld that rose in view. Corrèze stood on the edge of the wilderness of timber, lying iu disorder in the dry bed of the river, awaiting the loosening of the White Brook floods to float ihem to the Traun. Some birds began singing in the wood, as the sun set behind the glacier. " They are singing in my heart too," thought Corrèze, " but I must not listen to them. Heine knew the caprice and the tragedy of fate. He wrought no miracle to make the pine and the palm tree meet." The days that followed dragged slowly over the head of Vere. i Ischl, in its nook between the hills, has always a certain sadness about it, and to her it seemed grown gray and very dull. The glaciers of Dachstein and Thorstein gleamed whilely afar off, and her thoughts were with the hunters underneath those buttresses of ice in the haunts of the steinbock and the vulture. The perpetual clatter of the duchess's voluble tongue, and the chatter of society that was always about her,—even here, in the heart of the Salzkammargiit,—wearied her and irritated her more than usual. She felt a painful long- ing for that soft deep voice of Corrèze, which to her never spoke a commonplace or a compli- ment, for the quick instinctive sympathy which he gave her without alarming her loyalty or wounding her pride. " You are very dull, Vera," said the duchess, impatiently, at length. "I am never very gay," said Vere, coldly. " You knew that when you offered to accom- pany me." " Your husband wished us to be together," said Madame Jeanne, a little angrily. " You are very kind—to my husband—to so study his wishes," said Vere, with a certain chal- lenge in her glance. But the duchess did not take up the challenge. " Corrèze has told her something," she thought. To quarrel with Vere was the last thing she wished to do. She laughed carelessly, said something pleasant, and affected to be charmed with Ischl. They went to the Imperial villa, rode a great deal, were courted by the notabilities as befitted one of the loveliest and one of the wittiest women of the time; and the five days slipped away, as the Traun water slid under its bridges j and over its falls. Vere began to listen wistfully for tidings of the return of the Kaiser'f hunting-party. One morning at breakfast she heard that the Em- peror had come back at daybreak. But of Corrèze there was nothing said. Had it been any other memory than that of Corrèze, she would have been disgusted and angered with herself at his occupation of her thoughts; but he so long had been to her an ideal, an abstraction, an embodiment of all high and heroic things, a living poem, that his absorption of her mind and memory had no alarm for her. He was still an ideal figure,— now when be was lost in the mists of the ice- fields of tbe Dachstein, as in winter when before her in the creations of Beethoven, of Mozart, and of Meyerbeer. A little later that morning a jager brought to. the Kaiser-inn hotel a grand golden eagle, shot so that it died instantaneously, and had been picked up upon the snow in all its beauty of plumage, without a feather ruffled. He brought also a large cluster of Edelweiss from the sum- mit of Thorstein, and a letter. The letter was to Madame de Sonnaz from Corrèze.