Page:By order of the Czar.djvu/147

BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 135 with his views of the present inflated state of the money market and other matters of current interest.

Meanwhile Philip responded to Dolly's sympathetic inquiries about prison life in Russia, the high-handed character of what was termed administrative arrest, and what he intended to convey in that sketch, in which the woman's face was so remarkable as to have set Jenny talking of nothing else ever since they had seen it. Philip rode his hobby gracefully, with eloquence and with knowledge, and paused more than once to note how beautiful Dolly was, and what a happy contrast were her red lips, her bright genial eyes and warm healthful flesh, compared with the woman of the opera, "the ghost of Madame Lapukin," as Dick Chetwynd had styled her.

Presently Jenny had drawn her chair near the two young people, to hear Philip's story of this woman at the opera, and his desire to have her as a model for the face in his medal picture; and by and by she led the conversation up to their trip to Italy and the poetic loveliness of Venice, where she assured him he would find a model in every woman of the people whom he met. She had only been to Venice once, and then only for a week, and she thought she had seen more beautiful women during those seven days than ever she had seen in her life before.

Philip in reply could not resist the suggestion that it was not necessary to go to Venice to look for beauty; and if he accompanied them he should ask the favor of putting Dolly into a Venetian picture, for so far as he was any judge of the peculiarities of the Venetian face he thought Dolly herself possessed that curl of the lip and that sunshine in the hair which was supposed to be thoroughly Venetian.

Without seeming to say it, the clever little matchmaker let Philip also understand that Dolly was also blessed with a certain golden sunshine in the Three per cents., which