“I doubt that,” put in Steinmetz.

“And, even if he does, he cannot come poking about in Osterno.  Catrina will give him no information.  Maggie hates him.  You and I know him.  There is only the countess.”

“Who will tell him all she knows!  She would render that service to a drosky driver.”

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.  A drift—­constant, restless, never altering—­sped over the level plain like the dust on a high-road before a steady wind.  This white scud—­a flying scud of frozen water—­was singularly like the scud that is blown from the crest of the waves by a cyclone in the China Seas.  Any object that broke the wind—­a stunted pine, a broken tree-trunk, a Government road-post—­had at its leeward side a high, narrow snow-drift tailing off to the dead level of the plain.  Where the wind dropped the snow rose at once.  But these objects were few and far between.  The deadly monotony of the scene—­the trackless level, the preposterous dimensions of the plain, the sense of distance that is conveyed only by the steppe and the great desert of Gobi when the snow lies on it—­all these tell the same grim truth to all who look on them:  the old truth that man is but a small thing and his life but as the flower of the grass.

Across the plain of Tver, before the north wind, a single sleigh was tearing as fast as horse could lay hoof to ground—­a sleigh driven by Paul Howard Alexis, and the track of it was as a line drawn from point to point across a map.