She confided to me that you had made love to her!"

He tossed his head and laughed outright with gay unconcern. The tuft of young leaves in his headgear rustled as in a light wind.

"I had no desire to make love to Marta. It was the thought of you."

"Did you tell Marta it was the thought of me?"

With each word she outwitted him. Within himself, if silent, he was well content. When he spoke he made trouble for himself. She pressed her advantage.

"Zubof found Marta and delivered your message to her. She brought it to me; and she, Marta-Marta, I tell you -laughed that you had sent for me to come and feed you here in the park. Amusing yourself openly with me while you were in love with her! Exposing me to the danger, sacrificing me!”

"Kyra!" he called out in sternness, "I love you! You know I love you. Nothing could keep you from knowing."

She laughed in mockery.

"I fondle Zubof or Feodor or Sergei or Andriev or some other guardsman and come and swear it was my thought of you!"

He could not match her in words but he remained uncontrite and unabashed.

"Oh!" she cried, "it is because you are Russian." She spoke as though she drew away from her own Russian birth and sought safer, higher ground in her other commingled races-Tartar, Hebrew, Gipsy. "You are Russian, and the Russian always keeps fine words for whatever he does! He always looks innocent to himself! He betrays any virtue in the name of some other virtue and he betrays love in love's own name as you do now!"

He answered slowly, looking round him at the woods of Spring and up at the cleanness of the sky as though they -the forest and its stainless curtainattested the rightness of his nature.

"I did not make myself Russian and I do not know how I am made. Nor do I know why I feel as I feel and act as I

act. But I do know that I love you, that I love no one else. And because I love you, I love more the young tree under which you sit. I love more the violet I guard. I love more Her Imperial Majesty. I love more the guardsmen who are my friends. I love more boyhood memories of myself and the memory of my father. I love passing strangers more. Because my love of you has made the world more lovable."

Not so could he have spoken, had he not been deeply moved, the things he strove to utter being his defense. Hitherto he had appeared weaponless against her words, which like skillful swords cut his own words to pieces one by one as fast as they issued, leaving him in her eyes a disarmed and false and sorry figure. Till, half angered by this so mordant desire of hers to demean and wrong him, he had found deeper voice to summon to his cause what lay beyond her attack-the nature of great love itself, his love: which, when it takes possession of a man, may so touch and soften and gladden him that those around are cast in a kindlier light and the world comes to have a new meaning and a new happiness.

But the nature of great love itself, her love, said not so, not so. Other maids of the palace had not become more companionable to her but less; admirers among the guardsmen not more attractive but less. He, Leon, now that she had given herself wholly to him, virtue even, he, Leon, was everything and the rest of the world was not more lovable; the rest of the world was naught. As sometimes may be the nature of a woman's great love, which does not spread abroad as a new beauty upon the wide and tranquil sky but contracts into a solitary handbreadth of cloud where the flame is.

She had hastened to the park not to picnic with him as a faithful sentry to a violet but to reproach him with his faithlessness to one who loved him and whose virtue he now had upon his conscience, as she had hurried along mean

Meantime through the evergreens she had watched him as he walked to and fro, seeing a lonely beauty of love on his face, hearing him call her name over and over to himself, softly, musically. At one such moment, yielding to impulse, she had drawn the boughs apart, disclosing her presence.

Now, as he essayed to show how his love of her stirred him in different ways to tenderness for others, she shook her head and she grew the whiter. When he ceased, she was ready to visit upon him the irreversible judgment of those dumb hours:

"Promise to leave Marta alone. Make Marta understand that it was with her you trifled and that to me by love you are bound to me only. Promise no more play with Marta, nor with any other of the palace maids, nor with any other woman in the world. Now that I am yours, you are mine-you everything to me, I everything to you. Promise!"

She bent far over toward him. Her hands under her shawl caught and held to one another as to hope-hope which was nigh despair.

With no consenting sign, long his eyes rested on her; then, countenance as clear and voice as careless as ever, he answered her in quietness:

with some children. I told the children of Her Imperial Majesty's command. They wished to see the violet and I took them by the hand and led them up to it. When I brought them back the nurse received me with a smile. I was standing close to her and, with longing for you, I put my arms around her and kissed her."

She lifted her face out of her hands and sat scrutinizing him as with freshly shocked, fully aroused intelligence and understanding: that even after sending for her, even while waiting for her-during those moments!-he had not desisted, he had indulged his amorous ways with yet another, the first woman in sight, a mere passer-by: in composure he now told her this.

Old warm tender things went out of her face; he saw them go. New things came into it; he saw them come.

“Had I reached here a little sooner I might have seen the nurse in your arms! I might actually have witnessed the familiar spectacle of your love of me!"

Her words made you think of light, dry flakes of snow.

He faltered, then persevered in finishing his story in candor to the last.

"The nurse understood. As she walked away with the children she called back to me: "The embrace was not for me! You imagined I was some one else! You love!""

"Made I those promises, I would break them if I ever wished to break them. I am what I am. Promises could not make me what I am not."

She bent quickly over to her lap, burying her face out of his sight in her hands. He went on in his open-minded way.

"A little thing happened here in the

gypsies were asleep. By rich promises they were persuaded to dress, to serve wine, to dance. The dancing reached its climax with the coming out of the gypsy whom alone the nobleman had

come to see. She was used to have drunken Russians throw their stuffed purses to her, throw jeweled rings. She danced to this one; he drew out his bag of gold mesh and tossed her a coin and rose to leave. She walked to where the coin had fallen, stood over it, threw back her head and laughed, and kicked the coin back at him. All the homeward drive that laughter had been in his ears -a woman's laughter at a man, such laughter and now he heard it againlaughter like it-horrible laughter at him.

It was as if the barbaric woman, sitting under the green tree, had with the proud fierce instincts of her blood risen and kicked back at him the coin of his words his price to her for having danced to him the dance of her youth, innocence, love.

She did actually rise. She sprang up and as the shawl slipped from her shoulders, she threw it round them. again and turned away-what more was there to hear or to say? Toward the footpath running to the palace she moved swiftly. Then from some fresh impulse which counted not consequences but would wreak itself upon him for its brief moment, she returned and lingeringly reseated herself. She had assumed a manner as unconcerned as his own. "Another of those little things-your little things happened in the park today. As I was on my way here, two soldiers stopped me. I told them I was looking for a young guardsman whom Her Imperial Majesty had placed as sentry to a violet. They laughed and one of them put his arms around me and kissed me, then the other took me away from him and put his arms around me and kissed me, and both asked me where the violet lived. I told them."

He halted violently in his sentry walk, his figure squared toward her, rigid. Into his face rushed his wounded respect for her; he reddened with some immeasurable, unutterable wrath of shame. Into his ears faintly from a distance began to

pour the sounds of a universal tumult from his friendly forest, anger of its wild creatures who to themselves were always clean in their loves; they had heard her, all of them, wherever they were, and the whole forest was in an uproar.

She feigned to play with the fringes of her shawl, letting them run between her fingers like golden waters, smilingly intent on them, amusing herself.

Barely could he mutter in an undertone thick and husky his repudiation of her story:

"That is not true. That did not happen."

She continued, tossing upward the fringes of the shawl and catching them in her palms like yellow sands:

"Did I accept their caresses? Yes. Was I offended by what they thought of me? No. Once I loved some one and gave myself to him. He took me, then in a day did not want me any more. Could the rest greatly matter to me? Not greatly. Did I much care who was second? Not I. Third? Not I. Shall I not some day belong to whomsoever I may meet?

He heard yet did not hear. He heeded but did not heed. He called out to her more loudly and commandingly by virtue of all that was true and steadfast in himself and by virtue of what was now his right to what was true and steadfast in her.

"Tell me it is not true about those soldiers!"

Up and up and up she tossed the fringes of her shawl, beginning to watch him keenly with a fine kindling triumph.

"Some day I shall not have this," she said, holding up a fold of the shawl, "nor this," she said, reaching down and lifting and letting go the bright new crimson skirt, "nor this," smoothing the velvet on her arms, "nor these," touching the bracelets on her wrists, "nor these," touching the earrings in her ears, "nor this," laying a finger on the jewel in the dimple in her throat. "In rags coarser and fewer the farther I go I'll travel my road-the road he set me in."

Well he knew the road she painted. Beside himself and desperate in his hurt, he cried more imploringly:

"Tell me it is not true about those soldiers!"

She laughed and kept her glowing eyes on him as if she were even drawing nearer to him in desire.

"What any longer have you to do with me and the soldiers I may like? In their arms hereafter. Never again in yours. You betrayed. They will understand. They will have their pleasure and pay my price-till I take theirs."

More agonizingly, he wailed as over something that had been loveliest to him and was being lost:

"Say it is not true, Kyra! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!"

More brutally she struck him as in the face with her reply:

"What have you to do with the soldiers who will love me in their honest way-an hour?"

He had come halfway across the open glade toward her, oblivious of all else. As her reply smote him he wheeled sharply and walked back to his faithful place. From there he waved his arm in the direction of the palace.

"Go!" he ordered. He drew himself up proudly, his musket in position, and resumed his sentry walk, alone henceforth with his duty to Her Imperial Majesty.

She had not expected this. Whatever effect, if any, she may have hoped for from her unplanned words, she had not expected to be accosted as some coarse guardsman repulses a woman of the streets who is beneath his desire.

As from an inconceivable blow she shrank behind the young tree: it did not cover her figure, it hid her face.

Moments passed. He began to send uneasy glances in that direction. Distant strollers crossed the park. If nearer ones should pass and discover the situation! If Her Imperial Majesty should come again, as the officer had said, on her afternoon stroll! More moments went by and he stood silent and un

decided. More, until hardly he restrained himself. More until he shouted: "Go on away!"

She stepped out and advanced toward him with light feet.

There are things within our natures so silent, so shy, so native to uninvaded places, that when along some unaccustomed path we come upon them unawares, though they are really there, yet they seem unreal. It had seemed unreal for Her Imperial Majesty, weighted with the cares of Empire and with the deeds and misdeeds of her own life, to pause that morning and turn her face. away from her companions at sight of a wild flower. It had seemed more unreal in two Russian peasant soldiers to look into each other's eyes in silence for a moment with thoughts of boyhood and of violets in the spring woods. It seemed most unreal for her now to pause before him and make the request she made, putting constraint upon herself to address him much as though he were a stranger:

"I wish to see the flower a moment. Do not question why. May I pass?" He wheeled upon her:

"You wish to see a violet! You!"

His look and language were all that could mean ridicule and insult. He flung out his arm again toward the palace in dismissal of her.

She uttered a low, wild cry, searching his features with dilated eyes. Pressing her hands to her head as under a heavier blow, she turned and ran from him. Yet several paces off she paused, hesitated, wavered, then came strangely back, asking strangely:

"Give me the broken fir bough behind you-my emblem."

"Yes," he muttered, "it is your emblem!"-he thinking of it as hanging at the end of the path of death.

He strode to the evergreen and jerked off the dangling limb. The rustle of garments startled him and, turning, he saw her rushing toward the violet. He sprang toward her as with his own mournful death cry. He threw at her the bough of thorny fir, threw it into her

face, at her eyes, to sting her, blind her, confuse and retard her for the briefest instant.

Her hand stretched downward toward the flower, her fingers were closing about the leaves. With a desperate lunge of his body, his arm thrust far forward, he drove the bayonet into her hand and pinioned it against the earth. Then he jerked the blade out of the flesh, and pushed her heavily away in horror of her treachery and her deadly purpose.

"Would you have me shot?"

Ashen pale, with trembling hand he wiped the crimson stain quickly from the bayonet-point and it glittered silvery again across his shoulder as he stood over her.

She screamed with the agony of her pain. She screamed in the rage of her defeat and failure. She ran back to the tree and threw herself down behind it as in collapse from a swoon of her senses. Then he saw her violently tear strips of her undergarments and bind her wounded hand. Then she sprang lightly up and crept toward him.

"Go back!" he shouted. "Stand back!"

She came on. Her face looked gray and set and hard as stone. Her eyes measured him with calm triumph as powerless in her hands.

But all at once a change swept over her. The poor little lovers' quarrel was nothing, her wounded hand was nothing; with terror in her eyes at sight of something behind him, august and most dreaded and terrible, she dwindled into what she was a maid from the palace, caught here in the park in a rendezvous with a guardsman at his post of duty.

"Oh, Leon!" she cried piteously. "What will become of me? Her Imperial Majesty with her suite!" and she ran weakly toward him for tender protection.

At those joyous words he faced about. While yet for the first bewildered instant his glance swept the empty landscape, she darted past him, tore away the violet

and a handful of its leaves, caught up the broken fir branch, and with deerlike fleetness sped along the path toward the palace.

Far she sped, then stopped and looked back. She held high and waved at him the flower; she held high and waved the broken bough, symbol of death as well as of victory. She came nearer and danced and waved them in wilder triumph over him. She came nearer, nearer, nearer. She came so near that across the space she raved at him:

"I shall tell that you gave it to megave it!-gave! I shall tell Zubof and the guardsmen shall know. I shall tell Marta and the maids will know. I shall tell my Maid-of-Honor and Her Imperial Majesty shall know that you gave her violet to one of the maids. If Her Imperial Majesty doubts, the violet will be brought to her in a vase for proof."

She came nearer. She came close and dinned her taunts into his brain. She came up closer. She looked into his face. into his eyes.

Then she turned and fled, noiseless, from what she had done. He stood there, to himself alone with Fate.

He stirred after a while and cast his glance this way and that.

A young tree stood opposite him; he did not know how it came to be there. His mind somehow moved toward it, taking his body along. He left his musket where he had let it drop. It wasn't his musket; he didn't have any musket. He didn't have any post of duty. He didn't have anything to guard.

As he sat under the tree he remembered, it seemed to him, how one spring morning long ago he had first seen this tree waving its leaves in the sunshine and he had gone to it and pulled down a bough and broken off a tuft of leaves and had laughed and stuck it in his headgear. There had been a story he would tell when he was an old man: that when Catherine the Great sat on the throne of Russia, she had one morning found a