“Make her come to Russia, then!” insisted Piotr; “or if you can’t I’ll ask Uncle Jean. He is much nicer than you are, or Aunt Nàstia, even, Aunt Tatiana. Uncle Jean will bring little darling Malou.” His lower lip was beginning to tremble oddly, and the Duchess exchanged a look of apprehension with Garrassime. “There, there, my pet,” she consoled, quickly kneeling down beside her nephew, who with a sudden howl of distress flung himself violently into her arms. For months and months and again months the same unceasing request for “little darling Malou” had been droned into the ears of Garrassime. While still at Tverna he alone had heard it, but lately the sympathetic uncle and aunt and young cousins had been assailed by that monotonous demand. Piotr never quite lost sight of it, and the slightest incident served to bring his desire to the surface, for during his sojourn in Brittany those two, Piotr and the “Gamin,” had become fast friends indeed. “Come,” murmured Tatiana, lifting the heavy boy in her arms--“come, don’t cry, Piotr dear. Get Garrassime to put on your coat and we will go and walk in the park. There’s military music at the Kiosk to-day.” But Piotr refused to be comforted. Tears as big and round as glass beads kept rolling down his sun-kissed cheeks, and he clung about his aunt so desperately that at last she was forced to sit down and rock him to and fro like a baby. “I want papa--I want little darling Malou,” the boy sobbed. “Why has everybody gone away?” And with a sudden jerk of fury he tore himself loose, jumped to the floor, and, stamping both feet on the carpet, began to yell at the top of his lungs: “I want them now, at once! I’ll kill somebody--if they don’t come--I will--if they don’t come this minute!” Instantly Garrassime’s arms were about the lad. “That’s what I feared,” his eyes said, plainly, and Tatiana, well aware of Piotr’s ungovernable fits of rage, felt herself getting pale as she saw him struggling in his gigantic attendant’s restraining grasp. “What,” she was asking herself, dismally, “will become of this boy, now as good as orphaned, with such a temper?” And just then Salvières, drawn there by the noise, hurried in. “What’s all this?” he asked, glancing at his wife. She raised her shoulders imperceptibly, nodding toward the child. Salvières moved to Garrassime’s side and firmly took Piotr from him, and at his touch the boy suddenly ceased fighting. “Tell me, Piotr,” Salvières said, very calmly sitting him down on his knee, “why do you act like this?” “I want papa!” gulped Piotr, swallowing his tears. “I want little darling Malou!” “You do! Well, there’s no harm in that; but what makes you ask for them in such an unmanly way?” Piotr drew himself up, and, slipping from his uncle’s knee, stood, still shaking and trembling, before him, his eyes opened to their widest extent. “Unmanly!” he glumly repeated. “I am not unmanly, Uncle Jean.”