"Princess! I shall neither become a prisoner at court nor governor of Kamchatka. My wife will accompany me to my little estate of Pleskow, where I mean to be sometime farmer, sometime poet." "You do not love the girl. Vanity alone has led you to this step." Pushkin never took a blow unrequited--even from a woman. "Princess, did you know her you would know that it were impossible not to love her!" The Princess bit her lips until they bled. It was a cruel thrust. Quickly upon it followed a second. "Sophie has only inherited her father's sweetness of disposition; nothing of her mother." The Princess rose. She could bear it no longer. Her face was deathly pale, her eyes gleaming with a dangerous light. Going up to Pushkin, she seized his hand as she whispered: "Has the Czar also confided to you the name of Sophie's mother?" "Never!" "Have you heard it from any one else?" "From no one who had a right to know it." "Come, then, sit down by me," gasped the Princess, convulsively clutching Pushkin's arm, and drawing him on to the divan beside her. "Listen to me! I will make a confession to you. What I have hitherto told to none but the Patriarch I will confess to you." Sobs choked her voice; then violently tearing the lace handkerchief with which she had dried her tears, she continued, "Even to my husband I have never dared to say what I now tell to you: _I am Sophie Narishkin's mother!_" Pushkin, of course, appeared to be intensely surprised at this discovery. "You be my judge," continued the Princess, as she threw back the gossamer covering from her shoulders. She drew a long breath. "I was but a child, scarce sixteen; my parents dead. I met a man whom all conspired to worship. The aunt who brought me up was a vain, ambitious woman, and had made me equally so. Every one about me counselled me to return his love, telling me that he was unhappy for cause of me. They sought out old records of how Czars who had not loved their wives had sent them into convents, and had raised others, more beloved, to share the imperial throne. Flattery, ambition, inexperience, youthful fancy, turned my head, and I--fell. Ah, how low I fell! So low that my whole life since has been one expiation! Still, I never relinquished hope; I ever believed that the man who had wronged me would come one day to raise me from shame to splendor. I implored him; I knelt in the dust at his feet. Then he published the ukase that only the daughters of reigning families might be raised to the throne of Russia--that was the answer to my dreams! In the depths of my despair a man in my own rank of life came and asked my hand. True, he had no love to give me, but he gave me his name; I, too, had no love to give him, but I have borne his name honorably and spotlessly before the world. And now there suddenly breaks upon me the dreaded catastrophe which for sixteen long years has been my nightly terror: Sophie Narishkin will marry, and people will be