"Oh! hang it all, Aunt Clara, you can't have looked at the date! You can hunt up just those jolly kind of stories about our Henry VIII. if you want to, you know, and our Elizabeth wasn't the saint they made out. And as for Siberia, I am going there myself some day, on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Tamara will be all right. I wish to heavens she had taken me with her. We have got dry rot in this house, that is what is the matter with us!"
"Tom!" almost gasped Miss Underdown. "Your manners are extremely displeasing, and the tone of your remarks is far from what one could wish!"
Meanwhile Tamara was speeding on her way to the North, her interest and excitement in her journey deepening with each mile.
The snow and the vast forests impressed her from the train windows. Every smallest shade made its effect upon her brain. Tamara was sensitive to all form and color. She was a person who apprehended things, and from the habit of keeping all her observations to herself perhaps the faculty of perception had grown the keener.
The silence seemed to be the first thing she remarked on reaching the frontier. The porters were so grave and quiet, with their bearded kindly faces, many of them like the saints and Biblical characters in Sunday-school picture books at home.
And finally she arrived at St. Petersburg, and found her godmother waiting for her on the platform. They recognized each other immediately. Tamara had several photographs of the Princess Ardácheff.
"Welcome, _ma filleule_," that lady cried, while she shook her hand. "After all these years I can have you in my house."
They said all sorts of mutually agreeable things on their way thither, and they looked at each other shyly.
"She is not beautiful," ran the Princess' comments. "Though she has a superb air of breeding--that is from her poor mother--but her eyes are her father's eyes. She is very sweet, and what a lovely skin--yes, and eyelashes--and probably a figure when one can see beneath the furs--tall and very slender in any case. Yes, I am far from disappointed--far."
"My godmother is a splendid-looking lady! I like her bright brown eyes and that white hair; and what a queer black mole upon her left cheek, like an early eighteenth-century beauty spot. Where have I heard lately of someone with a mole------?