When at last I was presented to Mademoiselle Orviéff, I found that she possessed the essence of beauty--which is the power to please. Her appearance was exquisitely feminine, but there was a fire in her eyes and a curve in her red mouth that showed a spirit beyond her outward softness and delicacy. At first I thought her the simplest creature I had ever met with; but I afterward found her to be the most complex. This knowledge was not arrived at in a day, a week, or a month, but in a long period of familiar intercourse. She was a beautiful revelation to me; for the first time I comprehended the charm of a fine intelligence in a woman. She possessed without knowing it, a cultivated understanding, but she always appeared to me, in her serious moments, like a child playing at being wise. She did me the honor to exert all her powers of pleasing upon me, while Count Kourásoff looked on amused at her adroit cajolery of me and her determined effort to win my good opinion. She very soon established a remorseless tyranny over me under cover of the gentlest and most insinuating manner. I was her "dearest professor," her "best of friends," and meantime she held me in the hollow of her little hand. Her devotion to Count Kourásoff was of the nature of a religion. To me, and to all the world but him, she used all the flattering wiles and pretty artifices that render women charming, but she seemed to feel by a fine instinct that she needed but one art with him--to be her own true and natural self. But the destiny to be loved too much and by too many seemed to be Olga's fate. Among those whom her evident preference for Count Kourásoff had not discouraged was General Klapka, commandant of the garrison at Wilna, and at the same time one of the richest men in Russia. He was a man at all times unscrupulous and dangerous to thwart, and a singular complication placed the power of inflicting a terrible revenge in his hands. Vladimir Kourásoff was stationed with his regiment at Wilna under a sort of surveillance, and General Klapka could add still further to his painful and perilous position. He had more than once intimated to Count Loris that he held Vladimir's life in his hands; and this could be readily believed, for nothing seemed to impress Vladimir with a sense of his danger. He openly and bitterly complained of his banishment from St. Petersburg, and his conduct showed equal levity and recklessness.