"You can never know, Ivanovitch Balgonie, how much I pitied you--" "You, lady?" was the joyous response. "That is, I and Mariolizza," said Natalie Mierowna, slightly blushing (the Russians always speak thus, putting the personal pronoun first), "when we found you sunk on a fever-bed, in a foreign land, so far from your country, your friends, your mother, perhaps; for you are young enough, I think, to miss her still, at such a time, although a soldier." "Far indeed, in many ways!" replied Balgonie, with a bitter smile, as he thought of Uncle Gam and the Palatine ship, or perhaps it was illness that had weakened him. "I have a country to which more than probably I shall never return; but father, mother, or friends, I have none there: all who loved me once, have gone to the silent grave before me." "All?" "Yes, lady." "But you are making many friends in Russia," said Mariolizza, cheerfully: "there are my cousin, Basil Mierowitz and my brother Apollo Usakoff, who both, I know, love you as a brother." "True; and most grateful am I to them for their regard, for both are polished gentlemen. I have old General Weymarn, too, though I know not what he will think of this delay in delivering the Imperial dispatch." "Alas, that most tiresome dispatch!" exclaimed Natalie; "but I forget," she added, with a curl of her short upper lip, "those who proceed on the errands of the Empress Catharine, would need seven-league boots, or the carpet of the prince in the fairy tale, which transported the owner at a wish." "Hush, cousin," said Mariolizza, glancing timidly round: but no one was near save Corporal Podatchkine, who was stolidly smoking a huge pipe at a little distance on the terrace, when this conversation took place two days after Balgonie became convalescent, and fully a week since the night of peril on which he swam the Louga. "I cannot describe to you, ladies, the relief that came to my mind on discovering that it had neither been lost nor stolen, but was safe--" "In Natalie's bosom!" said Mariolizza, laughing. "Certainly the last place, where, for her own sake, I would place a dispatch of the widow of Peter III.," responded the other, haughtily; but Balgonie felt his heart beat quicker as she spoke. Her voice was sweet and low, and had a wonderful chord in it. The day was mild and beautiful, and truly an April one. The last of the ice had disappeared from the river; not a flake of snow was visible among the woods or on the distant hills; and the bright sun of noon shone clearly and brilliantly from a deep-blue sky flecked by floating masses of white cloud, and cast across the bosom of the Louga the shadows of the great fir trees that spread like a sea of solemn cones for miles along its banks; and amid that woody sea, the most striking feature was a white-walled monastery with its "golden-headed church" and all its metal cupolas glittering in the sunshine.