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.