Countess Shulski’s heart sank.  She knew so well of old how long eight twenty-franc pieces would be likely to last!  In spite of Mirko’s care and watching of his father that gentleman was capable of giving one of them to a beggar if the beggar’s face and story touched him, and any of the others could go in a present to Mirko or herself—­to be pawned later, when necessity called.  The case was hopeless as far as money was concerned with Count Sykypri.

Her own meager income, derived from the dead Shulski, was always forestalled for the wants of the family—­the little brother whom she had promised her dead and adored mother never to desert.

For when the beautiful wife of Maurice Grey, the misanthropic and eccentric Englishman who lived in a castle near Prague, ran off with Count Mimo Sykypri, her daughter, then aged thirteen, had run with her, and the pair had been wiped off the list of the family.  And Maurice Grey, after cursing them both and making a will depriving them of everything, shut himself up in his castle, and steadily drank himself to death in less than a year.  And the brother of the beautiful Mrs. Grey, Francis Markrute, never forgave her either.  He refused to receive her or hear news of her, even after poor little Mirko was born and she married Count Sykypri.

For on the father’s side, the Markrute brother and sister were of very noble lineage; even with his bar sinister the financier could not brook the disgrace of Elinka.  He had loved her so—­the one soft side of his adamantine character.  Her disgrace, it seemed, had frozen all the tenderness in his nature.

Countess Shulski was silent for a few moments, while both Mimo and Mirko watched her face anxiously.  She had thrown back her veil.

“And supposing you do not sell the ‘Apache,’ Mimo?  Your own money does not come in until Christmas; mine is all gone until January, and it is the cold winter approaching—­and cold is not good for Mirko.  What then?”

Count Sykypri moved uneasily.  A tragic look grew in his handsome face; his face that was a mirror of all passing emotions; his face that had been able to express love and romance, devotion and tenderness, to wile a bird from off a tree or love from the heart of any woman.  And even though Zara Shulski knew of just how little value was anything he said or did yet his astonishing charm always softened her irritation toward his fecklessness.  So she repeated more gently: 

“What then?”

Mimo got up and flung out his arms in a dramatic way.

“It cannot be!” he said.  “I must sell the ‘Apache!’ Besides, if I don’t:  I tell you these strange, gray fogs are giving me new, wonderful thoughts—­dark, mysterious—­two figures meeting in the mist!  Oh! but a wonderful combination that will be successful in all cases.”

Mirko pressed his arm round his sister’s neck and kissed her cheek, while he cooed love words in a soft Slavonic language.  Two big tears gathered in Zara Shulski’s deep eyes and made them tender as a dove’s.