Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/303

Rh "O Henri!" cried the half-blushing, half-laughing Clémence. "I fear your residence abroad has not advanced you in the grace of modesty."

"I shall punish you for that speech by deepening your blushes, sister mine," returned Henri, laughing merrily. "For my informant, M. Tolstoi, was good enough to add, 'There are two elder ladies of the most perfect grace and breeding; and a demoiselle with a face beautiful as the Madonna's, and no doubt a soul that answers to her face.' Of course after that I hastened to inform him that the young lady was my sister, and to beg for the address. So here I am."

"But why did you not write to us during all this long weary time?" asked his mother. "Why did you allow us to fear, nay, to believe the worst?"

"I did write, dearest mother, from Vilna, no less than four times; and you can imagine how I longed for one word in reply, and how my heart sank as days and weeks and months passed in silence. Of course I sent all my letters to Brie."

"Then the lazy, dishonest, incompetent postmaster of Brie ought to be ignominiously dismissed from his office, as no doubt he would have been under the old régime," said Madame de Salgues, breaking silence almost for the first time. That night she was taking, gladly and contentedly, the place of an interested spectator of the drama of life, in which her own part had been played long ago. If in the thankful little household there still was one anxious and desponding heart, it was that of Ivan—"the young heart hot and restless," not "the old subdued and slow."