Catrina Lanovitch.

“P.S.  Mother is afraid to go out of doors for fear of infection.  She thinks she has a little cold.”

Steinmetz folded the letter very carefully, pressing the seam of it reflectively with his stout forefinger and thumb.

“I always think of the lie first,” he said.  “It’s my nature or my misfortune.  We can easily write and say that the Moscow doctor has left.”

He paused, scratching his brow pensively with his curved forefinger.  It is to be feared that he was seeking not so much the truth as the most convenient perversion of the same.

“But then,” he went on, “by doing that we leave these poor devils to die in their—­styes.  Catrina cannot manage them.  They are worse than our people.”

“Whatever is the best lie to tell,” burst in Paul—­“as we seem to live in an atmosphere of them—­I must go to Thors; that is quite certain.”

“There is no must in the case,” put in Steinmetz quietly, as a parenthesis.  “No man is compelled to throw himself in the way of infection.  But I know you will go, whatever I say.”

“I suppose I shall,” admitted Paul.

“And Catrina will find you out at once.”

“Why?”

Steinmetz drew in his feet.  He leant forward and knocked his pipe on one of the logs that lay ready to light in the great open fire-place.

“Because she loves you,” he said shortly.  “There is no coming the Moscow doctor over her, mien lieber.”

Paul laughed rather awkwardly.  He was one of the few men—­daily growing fewer—­who hold that a woman’s love is not a thing to be tossed lightly about in conversation.

“Then—­” he began, speaking rather quickly, as if afraid that Steinmetz was going to say more.  “If,” he amended, “you think she will find out, she must not see me, that is all.”

Steinmetz reflected again.  He was unusually grave over this matter.  One would scarcely have taken this stout German for a person of any sentiment whatever.  Nevertheless he would have liked Paul to marry Catrina Lanovitch in preference to Etta Sydney Bamborough, merely because he thought that the former loved him, while he felt sure that the latter did not.  So much for the sentimental point of view—­a starting-point, by the way, which usually makes all the difference in a man’s life.  For a man needs to be loved as much as a woman needs it.  From the practical point of view, Karl Steinmetz knew too much about Etta to place entire reliance on the goodness of her motives.  He keenly suspected that she was marrying Paul for his money—­for the position he could give her in the world.

“We must be careful,” he said.  “We must place clearly before ourselves the risks that we are running before we come to any decision.  For you the risk is simply that of unofficial banishment.  They can hardly send you to Siberia because you are half an Englishman; and that impertinent country has a habit of getting up and shouting when her sons are interfered with.  But they can easily make Russia impossible for you.  They can do you more harm than you think.  They can do these poor devils of peasants of yours more harm than we can comfortably contemplate.  As for me,” he paused and shrugged his great shoulders, “it means Siberia.  Already I am a suspect—­a persona non grata.”