PART I THE THREE SISTERS (continued 2)

“So now our Baron is again after Sonia, but really after the mines, if you ask me.” She laughed a little, privately, to herself, and then said, “I wish he’d wash his neck....

“Soon, very soon, Andrei Andreiech, I shall leave them. It will be hard ... intolerably hard. But my mind is made up. I am not such a fool, Andrei Andreiech, as not to know when my time is up. And then I have a little pride still left in me. It is now merely a matter of the mines. I am ready. I have begun to pack. I have written home to Germany. But I couldn’t post the letter. Not yet.... Andrei Andreiech: what have I to live for? Will you tell me: what? ... Only when I am gone from them perhaps the children will say: ‘She has been good to us. She has loved us like a mother’ ... and then, perhaps, I shall not have lived in vain....”

I went home by the silent river. The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul was like a weary watchman. The Admiralty Needle seemed lost in the white mist. I sat down on a stone seat of the embankment and rested. The broad milky river was so mysteriously calm in the granite frame of the quays. I sat and wondered; then my thoughts began to drift; and I was lost in this half light, this half dream, this unreal half existence....