We talked of every conceivable subject. As she was going away she asked Sabran if he could lend her a book. He lent her Rudd's _Unfinished Dramas_, and asked me if he might lend her _Overlooked_. I said certainly, but I explained that it was more or less a private book about real people.
Two or three days later I met her in the park. She asked me if I had read Rudd's story. I told her it had been read to me.
"But it is meant to happen here, isn't it?" she said. "And aren't you one of the characters?"
"Then you were here when all that happened?" she said. "Did it happen like that, or was it all an invention?"
I said I thought there was some basis of fact in the story, and a great deal of fancy, but I really didn't know. I did not wish to let her know at once how much I knew.
"Novelists," I said, "invent a great deal on a very slender basis, especially James Rudd."
"You know him?" she said. "He was here with you, of course?"
I told her I had made his acquaintance here, but that I had never seen him before or since.
I gave her a colourless, but favourable portrait of Rudd.
"And the young lady?" she said, "Miss--I've forgotten her name."
"Yes, the heroine who is 'overlooked.' Do you think she was 'overlooked'?"
I said I thought that was all fancy-work.
"I wonder," she said, "if she married the young man."
I said I had not heard of her being married.
"And was there a Russian here, too?" she asked.
"It is an interesting story," she said, "but I think Rudd makes all the characters more complicated than they probably were. Does Mr. Rudd know Russia?"
I said that Kranitski seemed to me a far simpler character than Rudd's Anikin.
"Did Dr. Sabran know all those people?" she asked.
I said Dr. Sabran had not been here while it was going on.
"It would be very annoying for that poor girl to find herself in a book," she said, "if he published it."
I said that Rudd would probably never publish it--although he would probably deny that he had made portraits, and to some extent with reason, as his Kathleen Farrel was quite unlike Miss Brandon.
"Oh, her name was Miss Brandon," Countess Yaskov said, pensively. "If she comes here this year you must introduce me to her. I think I should like her."
"Everyone said she was beautiful," I said.