"I hope," said the Governor, "that you will not be hurt if I express my strong desire that the two English ladies should be my guests here. I do not mean to disparage your own well-known hospitality." Vronsky growled. "He had no right to send for them--what are English ladies to do here at the world's end?" he muttered. "He is as selfish as false"--but the final words were in his beard, and the Governor did not catch them. "He was, however, very ill for a few days," he remarked. "If he had died it would have simplified matters," said Vronsky, brutally. The Governor looked slightly hurt. "You do not then think highly of him?" "I? Oh, I know very little of him. It was plucky of him to come out here after his brother. He was quite sure, when he arrived, that his brother was dead. But he wanted to see the corpse, actually." This speech, in the ears of the man who heard it, sounded like absolute nonsense, but Vronsky had been nervy and uncertain in his temper ever since Felix disappeared, and he was pardoned. "Ah, well," said Stepan Stepanovitch. "A few days more will decide all. But it would please me well that Nadia Stepanovna should be the wife of an Englishman, if he is a man of position." CHAPTER XXIX A DOUBLE DILEMMA --Blame or praise What was the use then? Time would tell, And the end declare what man for you, What woman for me was the choice of God. --ROBERT BROWNING. In the bright sunshine the povosska sped on towards Savlinsky. They sat together, the man and the girl, staring out upon a formless future. They no longer read. But neither did they talk. What could be said between them? Minute after minute, mile after mile. The road stretched before and behind, mocking them with a false suggestion of being endless. If but it were! If but it were! If this could go on forever--this closeness of undisturbed companionship! Rona felt a kind of resentment against that cruelty of fate which seems to blind a young girl to her own feelings until it is too late. She recalled her sober fondness for Denzil, her eager clutching at any arrangement which would secure to her the continuance of her happy life. And the shock of repulsion which had seized her when some new feeling leaped to life in her at the touch of the man's lips in leave-taking, and she knew that she not only did not share his feeling, but that it excited in her the most complete distaste.