"Do be your own self for a moment," she commanded me, withdrawing from my restraining arm and stepping away out of my reach.
"How can I be myself, when I see and realize only you?" I bantered her.
Then came another transition almost as startling as it was complete.
She threw herself bodily forward into my embrace, clasping her clinging arms about me, while she buried her beautiful face between my chin and shoulder and burst into a passion of sobs which convulsed her so utterly that I was alarmed.
I had tried her too far with my bantering attitude, and my apparent indifference to a threatening and terrible fate.
But she only sobbed on and on, and I held her crushed against me until the storm should pass, knowing that a great calm would succeed it, and that her present expression of emotion was only the safety valve for all that had passed between us since the incident when our lips met for the first time.
We crossed to the window together, and stood looking through it upon the snow clad streets of the city. The storm of the preceding day and night had entirely cleared away, leaving only the inevitable traces of its violence.
As we stood there, Zara pulled the lace curtains between us and the window, so that we were screened from view, while we were enabled, ourselves, to see with perfect distinctness, up and down the thoroughfare against which her home was fronted.
It might have been a Sunday morning, so peaceful and quiet was the scene, and so purely white was everything, in its covering of snow, while the crisp atmosphere of that cold but brilliant Winter day, sparkled and glinted in the sunshine as if thousands of microscopic diamonds were glistening there.
A solitary policeman passed into our view and out of it again, a _britzska_ rushed past an adjacent corner with the horse at galloping speed; a child played with its father for a moment, within our range of vision, and then disappeared; a fur clad pedestrian ran up the steps of a nearby residence, and passed inside of it; all these trivial incidents of observation, came and went, while we stood there, leaving behind them no impression save one of peace, quiet and security. Yet they impressed themselves upon my memory indelibly, and I can see before me even now, the vision of that afternoon in St. Petersburg, with the clinging right hand of my beloved one resting upon my shoulder, with my left arm about her warm and pulsing body, with love, in all its transcendent qualities, dominating all things real and unreal, and filling my heart, and soul, and my intelligence, with a perfection of blissful content which words cannot describe, and which may never be understood save by him who has experienced it.