"
Paul shrugged his shoulders.
There was no mention of Etta. They stood side by side, both thinking of
her, both looking at her, as she skated with De Chauxville. There lay
the danger, and they both knew it. But she was the wife of one of them
and their lips were necessarily sealed.
"And it will be permitted," Claude de Chauxville happened to be saying
at that moment, "that I call and pay my respects to an exiled princess?"
"There will be difficulties," answered Etta, in that tone which makes it
necessary to protest that difficulties are nothing under some
circumstances--the which De Chauxville duly protested with much fervor.
"You think that twenty miles of snow would deter me," he said.
"Well, they might."
"They might if--well--"
He left the sentence unfinished--the last resource of the sneak and the
coward who wishes to reserve to himself the letter of the denial in the
spirit of the meanest lie.
CHAPTER XXIV
HOME
A tearing, howling wind from the north--from the boundless snow-clad
plains of Russia that lie between the Neva and the Yellow Sea; a gray
sky washed over as with a huge brush dipped in dirty whitening; and the
plains of Tver a spotless, dazzling level of snow.
The snow was falling softly and steadily, falling, as it never falls in
England, in little more than fine powder, with a temperature forty
degrees below freezing-point.
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