The Girl from Nowhere by Baillie Reynolds

-- I found it a terrible thing. These villains set on me, and I beginning to resist, they gave but a call, and in came their master. I would, as the saying is, have given my life for a penny: but that, as God would have it, I was clothed with armor of proof. -- JOHN BUNYAN.

In the northern parts of Siberia, in summer time, it seems as if the night would never come. At midsummer, it is almost true to say that there is no night -- nothing but a veil of sapphire twilight, which lasts three or four hours. It was a month past midsummer when Felix drove to play tennis and dine at the Governor's house; but even then the dark was long in coming, and Vronsky did not expect his darling home until midnight. There was no moon that night; but the sky was cloudless, and the North burnt as if with the glow of a furnace hidden just below the horizon.