Page:Hope--Sophy of Kravonia.djvu/93

THE PICTURE AND THE STAR or thrust forth—left Paris together on the 13th or 14th of August, en route for Kravonia. With Sophy went the bullet-pierced picture and the little bundle of letters. She did not forget. With a sore wound in her heart she turned to face a future dark, uncertain, empty of all she had loved. And—had she seen Marie Zerkovitch's shudder? Did she remember again, as she had remembered by the Calvaire at Fontainebleau, how Pharos had said that what she loved died? She had bidden Casimir not fight thinking of her. Thinking of her, he had fought and died. All she ever wrote about her departure is one sentence—"I went to Kravonia in sheer despair of the old life; I had to have something new."

Stricken she went forth from the stricken city, where hundreds of men were cutting down the trees beneath whose shade she had often walked and ridden with her lover.