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Elizabeth Browne was a strange young woman to find among these Russian exiles on Prinkipo. Oliver Alden, who went over to the island now and then in charge of supplies, was intrigued and attracted by her. She was so perfectly English. She was such an amazing contrast to those Russian girls, Olga and Tania, and all the others who were waiting here until Fate or foreign potentates decided what to do with them. She had common sense, serenity, bluntness of speech, and emotional control. Certainly she was not beautiful, and yet, thought Alden, there was a beauty in her eyes—the beauty of a calm, humorous, courageous spirit.

“What is your astounding story?” he asked her one day, when he met her in the bazaar of Stamboul, doing a bit of shopping, he supposed, and seeing the sights. “How is it you became attached to that Russian family? Why do you still stay with them now that they’re in exile on that lotus-eating island?”

Betty Browne—as she was known in family life—laughed at all these questions. She also smiled and shook her head at a young Greek who invited her into his booth where he had a display of Oriental rugs.

“Come in, miss! Very fine rugs. I’ll give them to you. Choose one, miss. It will look very good in your sitting-room. I’m selling them for a smile!”

She spoke to him in Russian and he looked astonished and answered her in the same language. He could speak all the languages.

Then she answered Alden.

“Well, I can’t say I’ve had a tame time! It was more exciting than Belgrave Square, where I had my first place as governess in order to relieve the burden of a reverend and impecunious father.”

“A clergyman’s daughter?” asked Alden.

“All respectable governesses are clergymen’s daughters,” answered Betty Browne, with a humour which was hardly betrayed. “My unfortunate father has a living at Rodsall in Surrey. I don’t suppose you know it.”

“Like the back of my hand!” said Alden with a touch of excitement, because he was walking with a young woman who knew that place which he hadn’t seen for several years. “I’m an old Carthusian. I used to go birdnesting for miles around. I know every bush in Puttenham, and Elstead, and Eashing, and ten miles round Charterhouse.”

Miss Browne glanced at him sideways with a slight increase of colour. “If you mention those names again I shall become very Russian and burst into tears. They’re like an old song to me. I must have seen you with other Charterhouse boys on Puttenham Heath.”

“Good God, yes!” said Alden. “And now we’re walking in an Oriental bazaar after escape from war and revolution.”

A stout old Turk bowed to him obsequiously.

“I have many little treasures, my admiral. They will please the pretty lady. You would like a rest. I have excellent coffee for my customers.”

“No thanks,” said Alden. As he passed on with Betty Browne, the old Turk spat on the pavement of the covered bazaar.

“This place is like Aladdin’s Cave,” said Betty Browne. “But I don’t like its smell much.”

Alden agreed.

“It’s a smell which has been hoarded up for ten centuries. I dare say it’s the same smell that greeted the nostrils of our Crusaders.”

“It’s a mixture of incense and old cheese,” said Betty thoughtfully. “I dare say it might grow on one. Perhaps when I’m back at Rodsall I shall dream of it as a very romantic smell.”

“Tell me,” said Alden, “what have you been doing in Russia all these years?”

Betty Browne laughed, and in that laughter Alden knew that he heard the untold and untellable story of Russia in war-time and revolution.

“It would be a tale as long as the Arabian Nights,” said Betty Browne. “First there was the War. Then came Kerensky, who tried to keep the soldiers at the front. We lived through the hundred days when Lenin appeared. We saw dead bodies in the streets of St. Petersburg. We fled to Moscow and got caught there by the Red tide. We saw dead bodies in the streets of Moscow. They were mostly boys. Cadets of the old Army. There were many executions. Every day hundreds were shot. Ex-officers, you know, and people of the old régime. We had the proletariat quartered on us in a house opposite the Kremlin. We lived in a cellar of the house where Countess Markova—the mother of Olga and Tania—had often entertained the Empress and her ladies. It wasn’t amusing. There was no soap and we shared the lavatories with Red soldiers. I was rather scared about Olga and Tania, and I thought they might shoot Michael as the son of a high officer in the Imperial Guards. We had some near squeaks. Anna Markova was hauled off to prison and interrogated about her husband. We gave her up for lost but she was let off for a time. Then we put on peasant dresses and got away in a farm cart. We joined a party of gipsies for a time and wandered south with them. We were caught in Kieff and Michael would have been shot if I hadn’t talked to the commandant like a Dutch uncle. I think he liked me because I was English. He had once been to Margate and seemed to think it was heaven. After that we lived with a nice family on their country estate.

“For some reason the peasants left them alone for a long time, until they set the house on fire and shot the father and son, Nicolai and Boris Nicolaievitch, who had been very nice to us. We had to hop it again. We slept under bushes, and trudged the long Russian roads for weeks and months. We saw men hanged on the trees. It’s queer what faces men make when they’re hanged. We heard many stories, enough to freeze one’s blood. We didn’t get much to eat, of course. Olga had typhus and nearly died. Tania bit the hand of a Red soldier who tried to kiss her, and he banged her head with the butt of his gun. Nobody wanted to play about with me, that’s one comfort.”

“Good God,” said Alden again. “What frightful experiences. And you look as if you had never left Surrey.”

“We were a year before we got to the Villa Mimosa in the Crimea,” said Miss Browne. “We were jolly glad to get there. It was very luxurious after our wanderings. We slept in beds with clean sheets. Anna Markova, poor dear, wept with joy at the sight of this summer home. It seemed so very safe, and so very far from Moscow. General Wrangel came to tea with us several times. We entertained quite a company of Russian aristocrats who had all come down to the Crimea and thought it safe.... At the end, as you know, it wasn’t as safe as all that. If it hadn’t been for you ...”

Alden stood stock-still and stared into the eyes of this young woman.

“What a story,” he said, “in spite of all the million things you’ve left out! And yet you look untouched by all that. You look like any of those girls who at this very moment are swinging their clubs on Puttenham golf course and have never known danger, or death, or vermin, or typhus, or the tiger in the soul of man. How have you kept like that?”

Miss Browne looked astonished. “Why not? It’s nothing to what some of these Russians have been through.”

They left the bazaar and wandered through Stamboul and went into a mosque, where Alden kicked off his shoes and put on the slippers provided by an old Turk.

“Very impressive,” said Betty Browne. “The Mahommedans knew how to build all right. I can’t say I know much about their religion.”

They went into other mosques, and at midday stood under a minaret where the Imam cried out the call to prayer in a long-drawn chant in the Eastern scale. Groups of Turks were washing their feet and wrists at the fountains. They spat as an English naval officer passed them with a young woman of his own country. In market squares other Turks sat about, smoking their narghiles. They spat as Alden passed with Betty Browne.

“These Turks don’t seem to like us,” said Betty Browne.

“They’re rather peeved with us,” said Alden. “They don’t like this international control of Constantinople, nor our mandates over Palestine and Mespot, nor—especially—our handing Smyrna to the Greeks. There’s a fellow named Mustapha Pasha who is raising an army to get back Smyrna. If he does, there’s going to be some dirty work.”

“More of it?” asked Miss Browne, with raised eyebrows. “I thought peace had come.”

“We call it peace,” said Alden grimly.

They took coffee together in a little coffee-house not far from San Sofia, where he had shown her the carved imprint of a Sultan’s palm which he had made on the wall after dabbling it in the blood of Christians.

“Tell me about your Russian family,” said Alden, lighting his first cigarette after coffee. “That girl Olga is easy on the eye, as the Americans say. A dangerous young woman.”

“She’s hardly a woman yet,” said Betty with an indulgent smile. “She’s only just becoming conscious of her own beauty. I remember her as a little girl in short frocks. I tried to teach her English manners, poor babe!”

“What’s going to happen to her?” asked Alden.

Miss Browne suddenly became slightly pale.

“What’s going to happen to any of them?” she said in a low voice. “I can’t bear to think of all they will have to go through—my dear Anna Markova, who is a saint—and Tania, my wild bird—and Michael who used to say his prayers to me after I had tucked him up in bed in the house at St. Petersburg before the War.”

“There are nearly a million of these Russian exiles,” said Alden. “They will always be wanderers from a lost world. I can’t imagine their future.”

Miss Browne asked for a ‘gasper’, and Alden gave her the usual Gold Flake cigarette which was served up with his rations.

“I’ve a fearful blow for them,” said Betty Browne. “I hardly have the courage to tell them. They seem to find me a bit of a comfort in hard times. They rely on me in a way.”

Alden guessed that she was going back to England, and he was right.

“My father wants me,” she said. “My brother was killed in the War, like so many other brothers.”

“Two of mine,” said Alden quietly. “When do you go, Miss Browne?”

She was going quite soon. As soon as she could brace herself to leave this Russian family with whom she had lived for seven years.

“I shall feel very Russian in England,” she said. “One becomes Russian in one’s mind.”

“How does that work?” asked Alden.

“Things frightfully important in an English village would seem ridiculous. The local gentry with their talk about herbaceous borders and the weather, will seem very dull and stupid, poor dears, because they know nothing about lice and typhus and corpses hanging from tall wayside trees, and the long roads of Russia with a Red Army coming hard on one’s heels. I shan’t know how to behave in father’s drawing-room. I shall say awful things, very shocking to English ears. And I shall always long to come back again to Anna Markova and Olga and Tania and Michael, because they really can’t get on unless I look after them.”

“One day,” said Alden, “I shall invite myself to tea in your father’s rectory.”

“I’ll give you a good cup of tea,” said Betty Browne.

Some camels were being led past their coffee-house by an old Turk. A tall man with a red tarboosh on his head and bare feet under ragged trousers straddled a small donkey. A ragged and veiled woman walked across the square. A French officer in horizon bleu stopped to light a cigarette, and saluted Alden civilly as he passed. A Cossack officer strode by with his long black coat swinging and his cartridge-belt glistening in the sunlight. It was very far from Rodsall in the county of Surrey.