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Updated: June 27, 2025
The change of position advised by Poluski rendered them safe from their assailants' bullets until the door was actually off its hinges and the furniture thrust aside. In the last resort, Alec meant to show himself at a window and offer a fair target to the men in the houses across the street. When he fell the shooting from that quarter would cease.
As to the motive of the outrage or the manner in which it reached its sudden crisis, she had no more knowledge than the Princess, and a quite natural question occurred to the older woman when Joan told how Felix Poluski had startled the King and herself by his warning cry.
He must put the best face on his blunder when discussing it with Beliani, and he promised himself a quite definite understanding with Poluski ere another sou left his pocket. Meanwhile, who was Poluski? That question, at least, could be answered easily. One clue might lead to another. To-morrow, when they met, it might be his turn to astonish the warped little Pole.
It was passing strange that crooked little Felix Poluski, ex-Nihilist, the wildest firebrand ever driven out of Warsaw, and the only living artist who could put on canvas the gleam of heaven that lights the Virgin's face in the "Immaculate Conception," should justify his nickname of Le Bourdon by humming those two lines. "I hope you are not a prophet, Felix," said Joan with a catch in her throat.
"If you tell her that you will defeat my friend's object in sending her to Delgratz!" he blurted out. "Eh, what are you saying? What, then, becomes of that poor Saint Peter?" "Exactly. She is going there to copy it, not to philander with Alec." Poluski screwed his eyes up until he was peering at Julius's excited features as if endeavoring to catch some transient color effect.
The hottest hours of a hot day might well have driven the citizens of Delgratz indoors; but some powerful inducement was drawing loiterers to Fürst Michaelstrasse. It was evident that the attraction, whatsoever it might be, was not supplied by the thoroughfare itself. Men lounged along the pavements or gathered in groups, and Poluski noted that few women were present.
Felix could not guess how his words lacerated the unhappy girl's soul; but she did not falter in her purpose, and again endeavored to rush from the church. Poluski uttered a queer click with his tongue. It testified that he had done his uttermost and failed. "Be it so, then!" he muttered. "Help me to pack up these masterpieces.
This might be sound commonsense, but it was not love, yet all this, and more, Joan said to Felix Poluski, and the little man had nodded his head with grins of approval. Meanwhile, he sang and was busy. Count Julius, posted now in the Pole's mottled history, had demanded absolute anonymity before he carried the negotiations for the picture any further.
In the noise and flurry of the train it was easy to tune the voice to such a note that it must be inaudible to those at the adjacent tables; but Poluski seemed to be careless whether or not he was overheard, and the girl fancied that Princess Delgrado had caught the words "Alexis," "Michael," "Delgratz."
Certainly, Felix Poluski, judged by his past, was no bad prototype of a character in that class of fiction; regarded in his present guise, as he sat opposite her in the dining car of the Orient Express, he looked the most harmless desperado that ever preyed on a quivering world. His face seemed to be smaller and more wrinkled than usual.
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