“Hop! Hop, Garrassime! Kick out your heels, horsey! Go faster! Go faster!” Piotr was calling out at the top of his voice, and in the small, heavily perfumed salon there was silence, tense and terrible, an oppressive lull in a storm. There was a burst of laughter, and the galloping of little feet pursuing Garrassime, the merry jingle of the silver bells, of the bridle with which the boy was driving his human steed, and then silence again. Laurence had fallen forward against the cushions, her face hidden, both hands covering her ears. Basil drew a deep breath, and suddenly tears rose to his eyes. Slowly he walked to a window, and, his back toward her, gazed unseeingly at the immense _steppe_ rolling out from the rocks far below. The magnificent isolation of the place was almost tragic in its completeness, and from that height the vast wrinklings of the unspotted snow-field seemed wrought from imperishable marble by the craft of some giant sculptor, enamoured of Eternity. “Hear me, Basil!” murmured Laurence, hoarsely. “What you say is monstrous--false to the core. The boy is _yours_--_yours_, do you hear me?” There was the ring of truth in her words now, but the man who listened had ceased to believe once and for all. A bad woman may inspire passion, but not the love that trusts and comprehends. “How can I know?” came from the window, in a voice so altered that she did not recognize it, and abruptly started forward to see who had spoken. “How can I know,” went on the lifeless, monotonous accusation, “since you were always untrue? Had you, tired of my tenderness, yielded to a sudden impulse and given yourself to another, you might yet have had some shadow of an excuse, perhaps. You would have merely sunk, in so doing, to the level of those women who break faith because it is their whim or their nature to do so. But what of the crime committed by a free agent in accepting another man’s name, his love and trust, when it has become no longer possible to do so without black dishonor? You were talking a while ago of your poltroonery with regard to my peasants--my people here. What is that compared to the atrocious cowardice you were guilty of when you greedily accepted me as your husband--your best friend, your protector--knowing that you were no longer yours to dispose of, for a fortune or otherwise?” “You are cruel--unfair, and you know it! There has been nothing, nothing, I tell you, that was serious between me and the--the--young man you named just now. He was a childhood’s friend, nothing more.” Basil did not turn, he shrugged his shoulders wearily, that was all; and Laurence, cowed, daunted by this contemptuous silence, glanced apprehensively at those broad shoulders in a quick, haunted way.