The Saxon Gardens are in the heart of Warsaw, and, in London, would be called a park.  At certain hours the fashionable world promenades beneath the trees, and at all times there is a thoroughfare across from one quarter of the town to another.

Wanda often sat there in the morning or walked slowly with her father at such times as the doctor’s instructions to take exercise were still fresh upon his memory.  There are seats beneath the trees, overlooking the green turf and the flowers so dear to the Slavonian soul.  Later in the morning these seats are occupied by nurses and children, as in any other park in any other city.  But from nine to ten Wanda had the alleys mostly to herself.

The early autumn had already laid its touch upon the trees, and the leaves were brown.  The flowers, laboriously tended all through the brief, uncertain summer, had that forlorn look which makes autumn in Northern latitudes a period of damp depression.  Wanda had gone out early, and was sitting at the sunny side of the broad alley that divides the gardens in two from end to end.  She was waiting for Martin, who had been called back at the door of the palace and had promised to follow in a few minutes.  He had a hundred engagements during the day, a hundred friends among those unfortunate scions of noble houses who will not wear the Russian uniform, who cannot by the laws of their caste engage in any form of commerce, and must not accept a government office—­who are therefore idle, without the natural Southern sloth that enables Italians and Spaniards to do nothing gracefully all day long.  Wanda was wiser than Martin.  Girls generally are infinitely wiser than young men.  But the wisdom ceases to grow later in life, and old men are wiser than old women.  Wanda was, in a sense, Martin’s adviser, mentor, and friend.  She had, as he himself acknowledged, already saved him from dangers into which his natural heedlessness and impetuosity would have led him.  As to the discontent in which all Poland was steeped, which led the princes and their friends into many perils, Wanda had been brought up to it, just as some families are brought up to consumption and the anticipation of an early death.

In her eminently practical, feminine way of looking at things, Wanda was much more afraid of Martin running into debt than into danger.  Debt and impecuniosity would be so inconvenient at this time, when her father daily needed some new comfort, and daily depended for his happiness more and more upon his port wine and that ease which is only to be enjoyed by an easy mind.

Wanda was thinking of these things in the Saski Gardens, and hardly heeded the passers-by, though—­for the feminine instincts were strong in her—­she looked with softer eyes on the children than she did on the Jew who hurried past, with bent back and a bowed head, from the richer quarter of the town to his own mysterious purlieus of the Franoiszkanska.  The latter, perhaps, recalled the thoughts of Martin and his heedlessness; the former made her think of—­she knew not what.