.

"Are you going to return that money to my father, Willy?"

"That's just as you like. When you come here for good, we could send it
back together."

"What makes you think that I will come here for good, Willy?"

"Because when I kiss you--like this--you tremble, Anna."

He caught her instantly in his arms and covered her face with passionate
kisses. Struggling for a moment in his embrace, she lay there presently
acquiescent as he had known even before his hands touched her. An hour
had passed before Anna quitted the flat--and then she knew beyond any
possibility of question that she was about to become Willy Forrest's
wife.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE PRISON YARD

The great gates of the prison yard rolled back to admit the carriage in
which Alban had been driven from the hotel, and a cordon of
straight-backed officials immediately surrounded it. Early as the hour
was, the meanest servant whom Zaniloff commanded had work to do and well
understood the urgency of his task. The night had been one long story of
plot and counterplot; of Revolutionaries fleeing from street to street,
Cossacks galloping upon their heels, houses awakened and doors beaten
down, the screams and cries of women, the savage anger of men. And all
this, not upon the famous avenues which knew little of the new emeute,
but down in the narrow alleys of the old city where bulging gables hid
the sight from a clear heaven of stars and the crazy eaves had husbanded
the cries.

There had been a civil battle fought and many were the prisoners. Not a
cell about that great yard but had not its batch of ragged, shivering
wretches whose backs were still bloody, whose wounds were still unbound.
The quadrangle itself served, as a Cossack jocularly remarked, for the
overflow meeting. Here you might perceive many types of men-students,
still defiant, sage lawyers given to the parley, ragged vermin of the
slums gathering their rags close about their shoulders as though to
protect them from the lash; timid apostles of the gospel of humanity
cowering before human fiends--thus the yard and its environment. For
Alban, however, the place might not have existed. His eyes knew nothing
of this grim spectacle. He followed the Chief to the upper rooms,
remembering only that Lois was here.

They passed down a gloomy corridor and entered a lofty room high up on
the third floor of the station. Two spacious windows gave them a fine
view of the yard below with all its gr