Where could he be?
The minutes seemed to drag into an eternity.

All sorts of possibilities struck her, and then she controlled herself and became calm.
There was a large photograph of her mother, which Mimo had colored really well.

It was in a silver frame upon the mantelpiece, and she gazed and gazed at that, and whispered aloud in the gloomy room: "_Maman, adoree!_ Take care of your little one now, even if he must come to you soon." And beside this there was another, of Mimo, taken at the same time, when Zara and her mother had gone to the Emperor's palace in that far land.
How wonderfully handsome he was then, and even still!--and how the air of _insouciance_ suited him, in that splendid white and gold uniform.
But Mimo looked always a gentleman, even in his shabbiest coat.
And now that she knew what the passion of love meant herself, she better understood how her mother had loved.

She had never judged her mother, it was not in her nature to judge any one; underneath the case of steel which her bitter life had wrought her, Zara's heart was as tender as an angel's.
Then she thought of the words in the Second Commandment: "And the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children." Had they sinned, then?
And if so how terribly cruel such Commandments were--to make the innocent children suffer.

Mirko and she were certainly paying some price.