The Retribution man-of-war, with the Duke of Cambridge on board, was said to have been lost, or nearly so, in the late great storm, which the Russians naturally hoped would delay the arrival of transports with reinforcements and supplies for the Allies; and he added that if the generals of the latter "had but the brains to _cut off all communication with Simpheropol, Sebastopol would surrender in three days!_" He mentioned, also, that the Greeks at Constantinople had taken heavy bets that it would not fall before Christmas, which seemed likely enough, as Christmas was close at hand now; and that there was a rumour to the effect that General Buraguay d'Hilliers--one of the veterans of the retreat from Moscow--had landed at Eupatoria, and given battle to General Alexander Nicolaevitch von Luders, and defeated him with the 5th Infantry Corps of the Russian Army; a most improbable story, as D'Hilliers was at that moment with his army in the Aland Isles! And now Valerie, wearying of war and politics, shrugged her pretty shoulders, and gradually led us to talk on other topics. As she was well read and highly accomplished, there were many subjects on which we could converse in common, as she was wonderfully familiar with the best works of the English and French writers of the day, and knew them quite as well as those of Tourguéneff, Panaeff, Longenoff, Zernina, and others who were barely known to me by name. I was afterwards to learn, too, that she was a brilliant musician; and with all these powers of pleasing, was a Russian convent, with its oppressive atmosphere of religion and austerity, to be her doom? When I compared, mentally, the Russian with the English woman of rank--Valerie with Estelle--I could see that the latter, with less of a nervous temperament, was more quiet and unimpressionable, and with all her beauty less attractive; the former was more coquettish and seductive, more full of minute, delicate, and piquante graces--the real graces that win and enslave; more mistress of those witching trifles that at all times can inspire tenderness, provoke gallantry, and awaken love. The brilliant Valerie would have shone in a crowded _salon_, while Estelle Cressingham, with all her pale loveliness, would simply have seemed to be the cold, proud, aristocratic belle of an English drawing-room. Valerie was fascinating--she was magnetic--I know not how to phrase it; and what now to me was Estelle--the Countess of Aberconway--that I should shrink from drawing invidious comparisons?