Page:The Tsar's Window.djvu/229

 family. The walls of the garden—or room, as I discovered it afterwards to be—were lined with orange, lemon, and magnolia trees, and a faint tropical perfume greeted me as I advanced into this paradise.

Servants in silk stockings and gold-laced coats were moving noiselessly about.

"Are we expected to eat amid all this magnificence?" I inquired.

"Certainly. You must do justice to a hot supper," responded George.

"You may," I said, as I took my seat at one of the small tables, the centre of which was a blooming bed of geraniums and heliotrope, obscuring my opposite neighbors, and lending a dash of color to the snowy linen and shining silver. "I shall do nothing except to look about me."

"I hope you will not altogether cease talking."

"I have been reading a frightful thing lately in the newspapers," said I, shuddering, "and I don't know why the remembrance of it should come upon me here, in the midst of this dream of the Arabian Nights, for it makes me sad, which is extremely inappropriate."

"I know," returned George; "it is the account of that fearful plague in the south of Russia."

"Yes," I agreed, growing pale and solemn as a recollection of the details came to me. "How horrible to think of dying in twenty-four hours!" I could not taste my bouillon, but sent it away untouched.

"Don't think of it," said my companion consolingly; "it can do no good to ponder over it."