Catrina was staring straight in front of her.  Her face had acquired a habit of hardening at the mention of Paul’s name.  It was stone-like now, and set.  Perhaps she might have forgiven him if he had loved her once, if only for a little while.  She might have forgiven him, if only for the remembrance of that little while.  But Paul had always been a man of set purpose, and such men are cruel.  Even for her sake, even for the sake of his own vanity, he had never pretended to love Catrina.  He had never mistaken gratified vanity for dawning love, as millions of men do.  Or perhaps he was without vanity.  Some few men are so constructed.

“Do you love him so?” asked Catrina, with a grim smile distorting her strong face.

“As much as you, mademoiselle,” replied De Chauxville.

Catrina started.  She was not sure that she hated Paul.  Toward Etta, there was no mistake in her feeling, and this was so strong that, like an electric current, there was enough of it to pass through the wife and reach the husband.

Passion, like character, does not grow in crowded places.  In great cities men are all more or less alike.  It is only in solitary abodes that strong natures grow up in their own way.  Catrina had grown to womanhood in one of the solitary places of the earth.  She had no facile axiom, no powerful precedent, to guide her every step through life.  The woman who was in daily contact with her was immeasurably beneath her in mental power, in force of character, in those possibilities of love or hatred which go to make a strong life for good or for evil.  By the side of her daughter the Countess Lanovitch was as the willow, swayed by every wind, in the neighborhood of the oak, crooked and still and strong.

“In Petersburg you pledged yourself to help me,” said De Chauxville.  And although she knew that in the letter this was false, she did not contradict him.  “I came here to claim fulfilment of your promise.”

The hard blue eyes beneath the fur cap stared straight in front of them.  Catrina seemed to be driving like one asleep, for she noted nothing by the roadside.  So far as eye could reach over the snow-clad plain, through the silent pines, these two were alone in a white, dead world of their own.  Catrina never drove with bells.  There was no sound beyond the high-pitched drone of the steel runners over the powdery snow.  They were alone; unseen, unheard save of that Ear that listens in the waste places of the world.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Oh, not very much!” answered De Chauxville—­a cautious man, who knew a woman’s humor.  Catrina driving a pair of ponies in the clear, sharp air of Central Russia, and Catrina playing the piano in the enervating, flower-scented atmosphere of a drawing-room, were two different women.  De Chauxville was not the man to mistake the one for the other.

“Not very much, mademoiselle,” he answered.  “I should like Mme. la Comtesse to invite the whole Osterno party to dine, and sleep, perhaps, if one may suggest it.”