“Yes!” whispered Netty, hurriedly. “I will come!”
Firstly, she was frightened. The others might come at any moment. Secondly—it is to be feared—she wanted to go. It was the high-water mark. This man carried her there and swept her off her feet—this workingman, in his rough clothes, whose ancestor had been a king.
“Go and get a cloak,” he said. “I will meet you by the great fountain.”
And Netty ran along the corridor to her room, her eyes alight, her heart beating as it had never beaten before.
Kosmaroff watched her for a moment with that strange smile that twisted his mouth to one side. Then he struck a match and turned to the chandelier. The globe was still warm. He had turned out the gas when Netty’s hand was actually on the handle.
“It was a near thing,” he said to himself in Russian, which language he had learned before any other, so that he still thought in it. “And I found the only way out of that hideous danger.”
As he thus reflected he was putting together hastily the contents of Joseph Mangles’ writing-case, which were spread all over the table in confusion. Then he hurried into the bedroom, closed one or two drawers which he had left open, put the despatch-case where he had found it, and, with a few deft touches, set the apartment in order. A moment later he lounged out at the great doorway, dangling the tradesman’s box on his arm.
It was a fine moonlight night, and the gardens were peopled by shadows moving hither and thither beneath the trees. The shadows were mostly in couples. Others had come on the same errand as Kosmaroff—for a better motive, perhaps, or a worse. It was the very end of St. Martin’s brief summer, and when winter lays its quiet mantle on these northern plains lovers must needs seek their opportunities indoors.
Kosmaroff arrived first, and sat down thoughtfully on a bench. He was one of the few who were not muffled in greatcoats and wraps against the autumn chill. He had known a greater cold than Poland ever felt.
“I suppose she will come,” he said in his mind, watching the gate through which Netty must enter the gardens. “It matters little if she does not. For I do not know what I shall say when she does come. Must leave that to the inspiration of the moment—and the moonlight. She is pretty enough to make it easy.”
In a few moments Netty passed through the gate and came towards him—not hurriedly or furtively, as some maiden in a book to her first clandestine meeting—but with her head thrown back, and with an air of having business to transact, which was infinitely safer and less likely to attract the attention of the idle. It was she who spoke first.
“I am going back at once,” she said. “It was very wrong to come. But you frightened me so. Was it very wrong? Do you think it was wrong of me to come, and despise me for it?”
“You promised,” he whispered, eagerly; “you promised me five minutes. Out of a whole lifetime, what is it? For I am going away from Warsaw soon, and I shall never see you again perhaps, and shall have only the memory of these five minutes to last me all my life—these five minutes and that minute—that one minute in the hotel.”
And he took her hand, which was quite near to him, somehow, on the stone bench, and raised it to his lips.
“We are going away, too,” she said. She was thinking also of that one minute in the doorway of the salon, when she had touched high-water mark. “We are on our way to St. Petersburg, and are only waiting here till my uncle has finished some business affairs on which he is engaged.”
“But he is not a business man,” said Kosmaroff, suddenly interested. “What is he doing here?”
“I do not know. He never talks to me of his affairs. I never know whether he is travelling for pleasure, or on account of his business in America, or for political purposes. He never explains. I only know that we are going on to St. Petersburg.”
“And I shall not see you again. What am I to do all my life without seeing you? And the others—Monsieur Deulin and that Englishman, Cartoner—are they going to St. Petersburg, too?”
“I do not know,” answered Netty, hastily withdrawing her hand, because a solitary promenader was passing close by them. “They never tell me either. But …”
“But what! Tell me all you know, because it will enable me, perhaps, to see you again in the distance. Ah! if you knew! If you could only see into my heart!”
And he took her hand again in the masterful way that thrilled her, and waited for her to answer.
“Mr. Cartoner will not go away from Warsaw if he can help it.”
“Ah!” said Kosmaroff. “Why—tell me why?”
But Netty shook her head. They were getting into a side issue assuredly, and she had not come here to stray into side issues. With that skill which came no doubt with the inspiration of the moment in which Kosmaroff trusted he got back into the straight path again at one bound—the sloping, pleasant path in which any fool may wander and any wise man lose himself.
“It is for you that he stays here,” he said. “What a fool I was not to see that! How could he know you, and be near you, and not love you?”
“I think he has found it quite easy to do it,” answered Netty, with an odd laugh. “No, it is not I who keep him in Warsaw, but somebody who is clever and beautiful.”
“There is no one more beautiful
