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It was a sad blow to the Markov family when Betty Browne departed from them. Olga and Tania wept with passion and did not believe that they could live without her. She had been like a rock to which they had clung in the shipwreck of their Russian life. Her courage had made them less afraid of Red Terror. Her English sense of humour had been reassuring in the most dangerous hours. She had slaved for them, mended for them, foraged for them. Always by some miracle of tact and character she had steered through the storm of Revolution, talking to kommissars with a cool assurance which somehow daunted them, getting peasants to deliver up hidden food, and going through gipsy adventures as though caravanning in the safety of Surrey. She had saved Olga and Tania from vermin and other abominations. She had attended to their morals, and their manners, and above all she had been their good comrade as well as their unpaid governess.

“We shall be lost without you!” cried Olga.

“We shall be like lost sheep among wolves!” cried Tania.

Their mother was equally grief-stricken at the loss of this young Englishwoman who had stood by them in war and revolution and who had become like her eldest daughter, though she was still called Miss Browne or “Brownie”.

“We owe you everything,” said Anna Markova. “We shouldn’t be alive without you. And now you are going I am more frightened than ever about Olga and Tania. I don’t know what will become of them.”

Betty Browne kissed her hand.

“Pray for me sometimes,” she said. “In England I shall always remember you all. I want to howl. If it weren’t so silly I should shed a bucket of tears and make my eyes all red.”

Her eyes were red on the morning she left Prinkipo. Michael carried her bag—she had packed her things into one small bag—down to the landing-stage, while Olga and Tania clung to her on each side. Oliver Alden, that very helpful though temporary naval officer, had booked a berth for her on an Italian steamer going to Naples. He was waiting for her at the quayside below the Galata Bridge, and relieved Michael of the handbag.

“ ‘Oh to be in England, now that April’s here’,” he said very cheerfully. “It gives me a pain in the left side to know that I’m carrying the bag of a lady who is going to England, and even to Surrey, and even to a village in Surrey where I used to go birdnesting in my innocent youth.”

“Don’t forget you’ve promised to come and take tea with me one day,” said Betty Browne.

“I’ve written it in my heart,” answered Alden.

“Do Englishmen have hearts?” asked Olga with mock surprise. “They seem so cold, so lacking in emotion.”

Alden smiled under his naval cap at this pretty girl.

“Englishmen,” he said, “are suppressed volcanoes. We’re the greatest emotionalists in the world, but we’re taught to hide all that by our Nannies and nursery governesses.”

“It must be very bad for you,” said Olga seriously. “Personally, I don’t believe in repression. When I want to laugh, I laugh. When I want to weep, I weep. When I am passionate I let it go off with a bang. But then, of course, I’m Russian.”

“Hasn’t even Miss Browne taught you a little English self-control?” asked Alden, laughing at this candour.

“I gave up trying,” said Betty Browne. “Nature was stronger than my book of rules.”

She slipped her hand through Olga’s arm and hugged it tight to her side.

Passengers were already going aboard the Italian steamer which was surrounded by Turkish caiques, rowed by Kurds, with Greek and Armenian traders trying to sell their merchandise to the ship’s crew.

“Nobody’s allowed on board unless making the voyage,” said Alden. “They’re afraid of stowaways and people without passports.”

“Oh!” said Betty Browne. “What a pity!”

She had turned a little pale. She was blinking away her tears. The moment of farewell was near. Olga and Tania began to weep again noisily, and flung their arms about this plain-faced English girl who had been with them through strange and terrible adventures. Michael was the last to embrace her, and he kissed her a dozen times on both cheeks, making her face flame with colour because he was so Russian and she was so English.

“One day we shall come to England,” said Michael. “One day we shall all live together again. You are our sister.”

“Oh, my poor dears,” said Miss Browne. “Whatever will you do without me? You’re all so disorderly. You’re all so helpless. I feel a beast leaving you all like this.”

She had to leave them. The ship’s siren was wailing like a banshee, the sound that had been the signal for so many partings and for so many beginnings of new adventures. They saw Miss Browne waving a handkerchief across the rail as the ship went out to the golden waters.

“A nice type of young woman,” said Oliver Alden. “Dead honest. Steel true. I dare say she plays a good game of golf.”

He treated the Markov family to tea at Tokatlin’s and kept from them an unpleasant piece of news which had reached him as a Naval Intelligence Officer, temporarily attached to the supply service of Russian refugees on Prinkipo.