The girl looked at her cousin with something in her honest blue eyes that almost amounted to wonder.  Etta was always surprising her.  There was a whole gamut of feeling, an octave of callow, half-formed girlish instincts, of which Etta seemed to be deprived.  If she had ever had them, no trace was left of their whilom presence.  At first Maggie had flatly refused to come to Russia.  When Paul pressed her to do so, she accepted with a sort of wonder.  There was something which she did not understand.

The same instinct made her refuse now to accompany Paul and Etta over their new home.  Again Etta pressed her, showing her lack of some feeling which Maggie indefinitely knew she ought to have had.  This time Paul made no sign.  He added no word to Etta’s persuasions, but stood gravely looking at his wife.

When the door had closed behind them, Maggie stood for some minutes by the window looking out over the snow-clad plain, the rugged, broken rocks beneath her.

Then she turned to the writing-table.  She resolutely took pen and paper, but the least thing seemed to distract her attention—­the coronet on the note-paper cost her five minutes of far-off reflection.  She took up the pen again, and wrote “Dear Mother.”

The room grew darker.  Maggie looked up.  The snow had begun again.  It was driving past the window with a silent, purposeful monotony.  The girl drew the writing-case toward her.  She examined the pen critically and dipped it into the ink.  But she added nothing to the two words already written.

The castle of Osterno is almost unique in the particular that one roof covers the ancient and the modern buildings.  The vast reception-rooms, worthy of the name of state-rooms, adjoin the small stone-built apartments of the fortress which Paul’s ancestors held against the Tartars.  This grimmer side of the building Paul reserved to the last for reasons of his own, and Etta’s manifest delight in the grandeur of the more modern apartments fully rewarded him.  Here, again, that side of her character manifested itself which has already been shown.  She was dazzled and exhilarated by the splendor of it all, and the immediate effect was a feeling of affection toward the man to whom this belonged; who was in act, if not in word, laying it at her feet.

When they passed from the lofty rooms to the dimmer passages of the old castle Etta’s spirits visibly dropped, her interest slackened.  He told her of tragedies enacted in by-gone times—­such ancient tales of violent death and broken hearts as attach themselves to gray stone walls and dungeon keeps.  She only half listened, for her mind was busy with the splendors they had left behind, with the purposes to which such splendors could be turned.  And the sum total of her thoughts was gratified vanity.

Her bright presence awakened the gloom of ages within the dimly lit historic rooms.  Her laugh sounded strangely light and frivolous and shallow in the silence of the ages which had brooded within these walls since the days of Tamerlane.  It was perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Alexis family, this beautiful tragedy that walked by the side of Paul.