flowers made patches of white here and there) was stirred from time to time by an inrush of the light breeze which was softly fluttering over the luxuriant leafage of the garden.
A charming picture! And the lady of the house, Valentina Mihalovna, completed the picture─lent it life and meaning. She was a tall woman of thirty, with dark brown hair, a dark but fresh face of one uniform tint, recalling the features of the Sistine Madonna, with marvellous deep, velvety eyes. Her lips were rather wide and colourless, her shoulders rather high, her hands rather large. . . . But, for all that, any one who had seen how freely and gracefully she moved about the drawing-room, at one time bending her slender, somewhat constricted figure over her flowers and sniffing them with a smile; at another moving some Chinese vase, then rapidly readjusting her glossy hair and half-closing her divine eyes before the glass─any one, we say, would certainly have exclaimed, to himself or aloud, that he had never met a more fascinating creature!
A pretty, curly-headed boy of nine, in a Scotch kilt, with bare legs, much pomaded and befrizzed, ran impetuously into the drawing-room, and stopped suddenly on seeing Valentina Mihalovna.
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