gradually resolved themselves into something very much like an understanding, if not a distinct appointment.  All people engaging in the game of love should be warned that it is a game which never stands still, but must move onward or backward.  You may play it one day in jest, and find that it must be played in earnest next time.  You may never take it up just where you left it, for the stake must always be either increasing or diminishing.  And this is what makes it rather an interesting game.  For you may never tell what it may grow to, and while it is in progress, none ever believe that it will have an end.

Netty liked Martin very much.  Had he been a rich prince instead of a poor one, she would, no doubt, have liked him very much better.  And it is a thousand pities that more young persons have not their affections in such practical and estimable control.  Though, to be strictly just, it is young men who are guilty in this respect, much more than the maidens with whom they fall in love.  It is rare, in fact, that a young girl is oblivious to the practical side of that which many mothers teach them to be the business of their lives.  But then it is very rare that a girl is in love with the man she marries.  Sometimes she thinks she is.  Sometimes she does not even go so far as that.

Netty was, no doubt, engaged in these and other golden dreams of maidenhood as she walked in the Saski Gardens this March morning.  The faces of those who passed her were tranquil enough.  The news of yesterday’s doings in St. Petersburg had not reached Warsaw, or, at all events, had not been given to the public yet.  Even rumor is leaden-footed in this backward country.

Presently Netty sat down.  Martin had never kept her waiting, and she felt angry and rather more anxious to see him, perhaps, than she had ever been before.  The seats were, of course, deserted, for the air was cold.  Down the whole length of the gardens there was only one other occupant of the polished stone benches—­an old man, sitting huddled up in his shabby sheepskin coat.  He seemed to be absorbed in thought, or in the dull realization of his own misery, and took no note of the passers.

Netty hardly glanced at him.  She was looking impatiently towards the Kotzebue gate, which was the nearest to the Bukaty Palace of all the entrances to the Saski Gardens.  At length she saw Martin, not in the gardens, but in the Kotzebue Street itself.  She recognized his hat and fair hair through the railings.  He was walking with some one who might almost have been Kosmaroff, better dressed than usual.  But they parted hurriedly before she could make sure, and Martin came towards the gate of the gardens.  He had evidently seen her and recognized her, but he did not come to her with his usual joyous hurry.  He paused, and looked all ways before quitting the narrower path and coming out into the open.

Netty was at the lower end of the central avenue, close to the old palace of the king of Saxony, where there is but little traffic; for the two principal thoroughfares are at the farther corner of the gardens, near to the two market-places and the Jewish quarter.