“Vera, you are a pretty woman!” I said; “yours are the longest eye-lashes, I think, I ever saw! Your complexion is simply faultless, while the crisp little curls of brown around your forehead take a copper hue in the warm sun I have never yet seen out of Titian.” “Why do you flatter me so?” she asked, laughing and puckering up her rosy lips. She was lolling upon the cushions at the end of the punt, having flung down her novel heedlessly. “I suppose I may be permitted to admire you,” I said, smiling. “Parisians are connoisseurs of beauty. You do not want to read? Then talk to me. Shall I tell you your voice is as sweet as a carillon of silvery chimes? That your presence is as graceful and bewitching as the vision of an houri? Well, I won’t be idiotic, but as sensible as a man can be when he has for companion the most charming woman in England.” “How ridiculously you talk!” she exclaimed, with a merry mischievous smile. “Remember, I’ve been married two years—and my husband—I——” “You are not devoted to him, Vera.” “How—how did you know?” she asked, starting. “Who told you?” “No one. But why deny it?” “I do not deny it. Indeed, I have tried to be good to him, Pierre, but he is almost double my age; so cold, so careless, and I hear so many awful stories of his dissipated habits that it is quite impossible to love him. We are, therefore, best apart.” “Poor Vera! I fear your life is not a happy one if we knew all.” “Ah, no, alas!” she sighed. “I’ll tell you something of it and you can judge, Pierre. Indeed, I am lonely and wretched.” She did not speak for some minutes; but her head changed its position from the cushion where it lay, and by some aberration of mind rested itself lightly upon my shoulder. There was really no harm. She did not know it. There was such a sweet odour of stephanotis wafted across my senses that I looked at the copper halo on my arm and wondered if it was not some rare orchid or tropical moss that had fallen there. She had turned her head away, and her hand was playing with the water-lily leaves waving gently in the stream. Her skin was like alabaster. Little curls formed arabesques over the nape of her neck; and her ear, pink and transparent, tempted me to whisper into it words of passionate love. There is no situation in the human drama so interesting as a _tête-à-tête_ with a pretty woman; and when that woman is married, with a grievance against her husband, the _tête-à-tête_ is all the more attractive. She told me a sad story, how she had been forced to marry Colonel Kovalski, but she did not mention that his real name was Krivenko, or that he was an officer of Imperial Police. She merely told me that he held an important official position, and that, having discovered his unfaithfulness, she had left him and come to England, where she had no enemies to gloat over her unhappiness. A tear stole down her cheek as she related her narrative, and a sob escaped her.