Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/295

Rh in evident perplexity over a little girl, who was crying and stamping her small foot in a vehement passion.

"Ma petite, ma chère fillette," he was expostulating, "be wise, I pray thee. Bethink thyself; all the world is gazing at us. Come, come, my child, dry thine eyes. I will buy thee a far handsomer brooch at the first jeweller's shop I can find."

"But it will not have in it the hair of dear mamma," sobbed the child, a slight, black-eyed little girl of eleven or twelve.

Meanwhile Madame de Talmont recognized in the gentleman an old friend, a political exile, who had doubtless accompanied the stream of returning émigrés back to Paris.

"Can it be that I have the happiness of seeing once again my dear old friend Monsieur de Sartines?" she interposed, making a most welcome diversion; "and this—is this young lady the little Stéphanie we used to know, whom I have so often held in my arms? Monsieur de Sartines, here is my daughter Clémence," she added. "She too will have grown almost beyond your remembrance."

But Clémence was already making friends with the disconsolate Stéphanie, listening to the story of the lost brooch, and comforting her with a tact and gentleness which Ivan was watching with admiring and delighted eyes.

Madame de Talmont soon remembered him, and presented to M. de Sartines "Our young friend Monsieur Pojarsky, a Russian, an officer in his Imperial Majesty's Chevalier Guard."

After the usual compliments, Ivan presented a request, framed as gracefully as a Parisian could have done it, that monsieur and mademoiselle would do him the honour to join them at dinner. The proposal was found agreeable, and the whole party adjourned to a handsome dining-hall, where a table exquisitely adorned with baskets of rare fruit and vases of flowers fully satisfied Ivan's expectations. Nor did the repast that followed disappoint the young Russian, jealous in the lightest