"O take me away from this place!" she said earnestly.

M. Bourget was troubled and anxious, but I whispered that it was only
the closeness of the rooms which made Madame feel a little faint. So we
got her out quickly into the cool bright sunshine of the Alpine
pastures. The Countess Lucia recovered rapidly, but it was a long while
before the colour came back to her cheeks.

"That terrible, terrible place!" she said again and again. "I felt as
though I were buried alive--shrouded in white, coffined in mort-cloths!"




CHAPTER XI

THE WHITE OWL


To distract her mind I told her tales of the grey city of the North
where I had been colleged. I told of the bleak and biting winds which
cut their way to the marrow of the bones. I described the students rich
and poor, but mostly poor, swarming into the gaunt quadrangles, reading
eagerly in the library, hasting grimly to be wise, posting hotfoot to
distinction or to death. She listened with eyes intent. "We have
something like that in Russia," she said; "but then, as soon as these
students of ours become a little wise, they are cut off, or buried in
Siberia." But I think that, with all her English speech and descent,
Lucia never fully understood that these students of ours were wholly