The Russian Officer

With Carlo's death, Natalie had lost her last friend; with the stolen
money and diamonds, Marianne was robbed of her last pecuniary means. But
Natalie paid no attention to Marianne's lamentations. What cared she for
poverty and destitution--what knew she of these outward treasures, of
this wealth consisting in gold and jewels? Natalie knew only that she
had been robbed of a noble, spiritual possession--that they had murdered
the friend who had consecrated himself to her with such true and devoted
love, and, weeping over his body, she dedicated to him the tribute of a
tear of the purest gratitude, of saddest lamentation.

But so imperfect is the world that it often leaves no time for
mourning--that in the midst of our sorrow it causes us to hear the
prosaic voices of reality and necessity, compelling us to dry our eyes
and turning our thoughts from painfully-sweet remembrances of a lost
happiness to the realities of practical life.

Natalie's delicately-sensitive soul was to experience this rough contact
of reality, and, with an internal shudder, must she bend under the rough
hand of the present.

Pale, breathless, trembling, rushed Marianne into the room where
Natalie, in solitary mourning, was weeping for her lost friend.

"We are ruined, hopelessly ruined!" screamed Marianne. "They will drive
us from our last possession, they will turn us out of our house! All the
misfortunes of the whole world break over and crush us!"

The young maiden looked at her with a calm, clear glance.

"Then let them crush us," she quietly said. "It is better to be crushed
at once than to be slowly and lingeringly wasted!"