There was much else to occupy it: not only in the way of work but of pleasure. Paris, even in her grief, did not forget the human necessity for pleasure, nor did Stefan Nikolai. She saw rather less of him than she had expected to, for he was frequently absent for weeks at a time on unexplained journeys, about which Joan had learned to ask no questions. But whether he was near her or not, she was always conscious of his enveloping care, his devoted watchfulness. He gave her, too, many friends besides Lady Arbuthnot. Once Sacha, always left on guard over Joan during these absences of Nikolai's, betrayed the fact that his master had gone into Russia. Joan taxed him with it when he returned. "Russia is not safe for you, Stefan!--you told me so yourself." "Surely you would not have me at such a time seek only places of safety?" he smiled. "Why can't you stick to the hospital work you came over for, instead of gallivanting about all over the place?" she demanded, with a petulance that concealed anxiety. "One goes where one is useful," he replied quietly. "There are many who know more about medicine than I, but few who know more about Russia--except in Germany, perhaps! My countrymen are very susceptible to the spoken word." It was his only explanation of his frequent disappearances; but Joan, understanding that wars must be won not only on the battlefield, uttered no more protests, and made the most of her friend when she had him. For the first time in her life, she came near to the innermost meaning of the word happiness. It was not the placid content of her "pasture-time," nor the feverish, half-guilty ecstasy which had come to her for a brief hour through the unworthy medium of Eduard Desmond. It wrapped her round warmly like the consciousness of some beloved presence--which indeed it was, though Joan for once did not quite dare to analyze the sensation. She only knew that here, among strangers speaking a strange tongue, she was for the first time in her experience utterly at home. And she was curiously at the top of her powers. In that atmosphere, nothing seemed impossible of accomplishment. There was a sense of personal possession and being possessed--"By Paris," she told herself; but in her heart another name echoed. Unaware, the great experience, the thing for which she had blindly groped, had come upon her; not with a sudden leap to which her nature leaped in response, but with a slow, quiet, irresistibly gathering force, like a great stream that bore her upon its breast, without volition, without struggle, toward some bourne of which she had no knowledge. And no fear. Joan might have said with Browning: "Let us be unashamed of soul ... Is it in our control To love or not to love?"