“Katinka,” she said, turning to her eldest daughter, “you speak French, and perhaps they do also.  Assure them that we will do our best to make them comfortable.  Come here, my dears.”

Then she formally, pointing to each of them, uttered their names,—­

“Katinka, Paulina, Olga.”

Dick, in reply, pointed to his companion,—­

“Jack Archer,”—­and to himself—­“Dick Hawtry.”

The girls smiled, and held out their hands.

“Mamma says,” the eldest said in French, “that she is glad to see you, and will do all in her power to make you comfortable.”

“You’re very good,” Dick said.  “I can speak very little French, and cannot understand it at all unless you speak quite slow.  I wish now I hadn’t been so lazy at school.  But we both speak a few words of Russian, and I hope that we shall soon be able to talk to you in your own language.”

Bad as Dick’s French was, the girls understood it, and an animated conversation in a mixed jargon of French and Russian began.  The girls inquired how they had come there, and how they had been taken, and upon hearing they had been in Sebastopol, inquired more anxiously as to the real state of things there, for the official bulletins were always announcing victories, and they could not understand how it was that the allies, although always beaten, were still in front of Sebastopol, when such huge numbers of troops had gone south to carry out the Czar’s orders, to drive them into the sea.

The lads’ combined knowledge of French and Russian proved quite insufficient to satisfy their curiosity, but there was so much laughing over their wonderful blunders and difficulty in finding words to explain themselves, that at the end of half an hour the boys were perfectly at home with their hostesses.

“You will like to see your rooms,” the countess said; and touching a hand-bell, she gave some orders to a servant who, bowing, led the way along a corridor and showed the boys two handsomely-furnished rooms opening out of each other, and then left them, returning in a minute or two with hot water and towels.

“We’re in clover here,” Jack said, “and no mistake.  The captain’s state cabin is a den by the side of our quarters; and ain’t they jolly girls?”

“And pretty, too, I believe you; and the countess, too.  I call her a stunner!” he exclaimed enthusiastically; “as stately as a queen, but as friendly and kind as possible.  I don’t think we ought to go to war with people like this.”

“Oh, nonsense!” Jack said.  “We’ve seen thousands of Russians now, and don’t think much of them; and ’tisn’t likely we’re going to let Russia gobble up Turkey just because there’s a nice countess with three jolly daughters living here.”

Dick laughed.

“No, I suppose not,” he said.  “But, Jack, what on earth are we going to do about clothes?  These uniforms are getting seedy, though it is lucky that we had on our best when we were caught, owing to our having had the others torn to pieces the night of the wreck.  But as for other things, we have got nothing but what we have on.  We washed our flannel shirts and stockings as well as we could whenever we halted, but we can’t well do that here; and as for money, we haven’t a ha’penny between us.  It’s awful, you know.”