conditions of that favour was that she should be treated exactly as a
condemned exile herself. Yet a couple of years later, in memory of her
eldest brother, who had served in the Guards and dying early left hosts
of friends and a loved memory in the great world of St. Petersburg,
some influential personages procured for her this permission--it was
officially called the "Highest Grace"--of a four months' leave from
exile.

This is also the year in which I first begin to remember my mother with
more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting
presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness; and I also
remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far, and
the gray heads of the family friends paying her the homage of respect
and love in the house of her favourite brother, who, a few years later,
was to take the place for me of both my parents.

I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time,
though, indeed, I remember that doctors also came. There were no signs
of invalidism about her--but I think that already they had pronounced
her doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could
re-establish her declining strength. For me it seems the very
happiest period of my existence. There was my cousin, a delightful,
quick-tempered little girl, some months younger than myself, whose life,
lovingly watched over as if she were a royal princess, came to an end
with her fifteenth year. There were other children, too, many of whom
are dead now, and not a few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all
this hung the oppressive shadow of the great Russian empire--the shadow
lowering with the darkness of a new-born national hatred fostered by
the Moscow school of journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened
rising of 1863.