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Updated: May 20, 2025
Another long pause, during which he was conscious that Hermia, her dignity in jeopardy, was descending the ladder and now faced their visitor, a fugitive smile upon her lips, pale but quite composed. "Hello, Olga," he heard her say. The Countess Tcherny's gaze traveled over her from head to heel, the gaze of one who looks at a person one has never seen before.
He took up the one nearest him, a volume on big game hunting, and turned the pages idly. Their unconscious and unwilling host took his sports seriously, it seemed. He dropped the book upon his knees, and as he did so it fell open at the fly leaf, upon which in a feminine scrawl a name was inscribed. He read it with surprise and concern. "Madeleine de Cahors!" Olga Tcherny's Norman friend who lived
"I beg of you " "Olga Tcherny's career in New York is ended. She shall never enter my house, or the house of any of my friends. That play was a lie, written with a motive. She has used me shamefully shamefully made me an accomplice, and placed me in the undesirable position of sponsor for her villainies."
However unusual Markham may have appeared to a person of Olga Tcherny's training, he was not an unusual young man in the ordinary sense. He had always taken life seriously, from the hour when as a clerk in a broker's office he had started to work at night at the League in New York, with the intention of becoming a painter.
She came out in a moment and announced that she was ready to go, and he saw that breakfast had done her no harm. So they followed Olga Tcherny's instructions as far as he remembered them and found a path through the woods which led northward.
Into Olga Tcherny's portrait he had put something more of his sitter than usual. He had painted the soul of the girl in the body of the woman of thirty, and if he rendered his subject in a manner more stilted than usual, he repaid her in the real interest with which her portrait was invested. He liked Olga.
Markham stood for a moment watching the white plume of Olga Tcherny's huge straw hat until it nodded its way out of sight. Then he turned back just in time to note a disturbance of the canvas barrier, from under which, her slouch hat pushed down over her ears, her gray coat hiding her finery, Hermia breathlessly emerged. "I've never had such a fright since I was born," she laughed nervously.
Alenon! What a dolt he was! This was the forest of couves or a part of it and in the night he had come into the preserve of the wealthy marquis. Olga's friends and Olga! A fine escape he had made of it, into the very sphere of the Countess Tcherny's activities! The Chteau must be near here, at the most not more than a few kilometers distant. He was a clod-pate, nothing less.
She thought of him as "grubby," whatever that meant, because she did not like him, but it was even more maddening for her to think of Olga Tcherny's portrait, which, in spite of her flippant remarks, she had been forced to admit revealed a knowledge of feminine psychology that had excited her amazement and admiration. One deduction led to another.
He had given Trouville a wide berth; for he knew some people there, friends of Olga Tcherny's, people of fashion who would have looked askance at his dusty clothes and general air of disrepute. He was not in the humor for Olga's kind of friends or indeed for Olga, if as the last note from her had indicated she, too, had arrived on this side of the water.
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