Netty tried to stop him.  She was very much distressed.  She almost had tears in her eyes, but not quite.  She put her gloved hands over her ears to stop them, but did not quite succeed in shutting out his voice.  The gloves were backed with a dark, fine fur, which made her cheeks look delicate and soft as a peach.

“I will not hear you,” she said.  “I will not.  I will not.”

Then he seemed to recollect something, and he stopped short.

“No,” he said; “you are quite right.  I have no business to ask you to hear me.  I have nothing to offer you.  I am poor.  At any moment I may be an outlaw.  But at any moment I may have more to offer you.  Things may go well, and then I should be in a very different position.”

Netty looked away from him, and seemed to be trying to think.  Or, perhaps, she was only putting together recollections which had all been thought out before.  She could be a princess.  She remembered that.  She had only been in Europe six months, and here was a prince at her feet.  But there were terrible drawbacks.  Warsaw was one of them, and poverty, that greatest of all drawbacks, was the other.

“I can tell you nothing now,” he said.  “But soon, before the summer, there may be great changes in Poland.”

Then his own natural instinct told him that position, or poverty, wealth or success, had nothing to do with the cause he was pleading.  He did not even know whether Netty was rich or poor, and he certainly did not care.

“What did you mean,” he asked, “when you said ‘Be careful’?  What did you mean—­tell me?”

His gay, blue eyes were serious enough now.  They were alight with an honest and good love.  Never of a cold and calculating habit, he was reckless of observation.  He did not care who saw.  He would have taken her hands and forced her to face him had she not held them behind her back.  She was singularly calm and self-possessed.  People who appear nervous often rise to the occasion.

“I do not know what I meant,” she said; “I do not know.  You must not ask me.  It slipped out when I was not thinking.  Oh! please be generous, and do not ask me.”

By some instinct she had leaped to the right mark.  She had asked a Bukaty to be generous.

“Some day,” he said, “I will ask you.”

And he walked with her to the gate of the gardens in silence.

XXVII

A SACRIFICE

Though the fine weather did not last, it was a promise of better things, like the letter that precedes a welcome friend.  After it the air seemed warmer, though snow fell again, and the thermometer went below zero.

Wanda and her father did not return to Warsaw as they had intended.