lovelier than her sister because she was a purer blonde, and yet Wanda
had been accounted a miracle. Remembering that, at a later period, a
foreign adventuress almost inextricably ensnared one of the imperial
family, the Countess Dobronowska's matrimonial project was not so
insane. Some other pretender to the grand-ducal left or right hand
thought it feasible, for everybody said that it was feminine jealousy
that led to the countess and her "little beauty" being ordered out of
the White Czar's realm. The pair, spurred on by the police of every
capital, and all are in communication with St. Petersburg, at last
rested in Paris. It was a favorable moment; the French government had
offended the older powers by its presumption in chastising venerable
Austria almost as severely as the Great Napoleon had done. The
Dobronowskas were let alone in the imperial city on the Seine; but,
unfortunately, the important state functionaries soon became as tired of
the countess's plaints as their brothers on the Neva. Reduced to the
shifts of the penniless aristocrats, the two lived like the shabby
genteel. They made a desperate attempt to entrap their Grand-duke again.
But the victim had warning and the pair were stopped at Warsaw. Here a
beam of the sun, long withheld, glanced through the clouds and
transiently warmed "the marrying mamma." A distant relative of hers, one
Lergins, was an attaché of the embassy and he fell in love with his
"cousin" Iza, as the mother allowed the youth to call her. As he had
splendid prospects and seemed to be quite another man as regarded
maternal control of Wanda's husband, mamma dismissed her brilliant
_ignis fatuus_ and tried to have a clandestine marriage come off. But
the young secretary of embassy was not of age and again she was forced
to depart for Paris--that sink-hole for refugees of all sorts. His
family put pressure on the officiale who in turn applied it to the
luckless _intriguante_.