child that
would be comforted. A single ray of sunshine filtered through a slit in
the wall above, dwelt for a moment upon her white face and showed him
all the pity of it.

"Lois, why should you speak like this because I come to you? Is it so
difficult to tell the truth?"

"Did they tell you to ask me that, Alban?"

"It was forced from me, Lois. I don't believe it. I would as soon
believe it of myself. But don't you see that we must answer them? They
are saying it, and we must answer them."

She struggled to be free, half resenting the manner of his question, but
in her heart admitting its necessity.

"I knew nothing of it," she said simply, "you may tell them that, Alban.
If they offered me all the riches in the world, I could not say more. I
don't know who did it, dear, and I'd never tell them if I did."

A little cry escaped his lips and he caught her close in his arms again.
It was not to say that he had believed the darker story at which
imagination, in a cowardly mood, might hint, but this plain denial, from
the lips of Lois who had never told him a lie, came as a very message of
their salvation.

"You have made me very happy, Lois," he said, "now I can talk to them as
they deserve. Of course, I shall get you out of here. Mr. Gessner will
help me to do so. We have the whip hand of him all said and done, for
don't you see, that if you don't tell your people, I shall, and that
will be the end of it. Of course, it won't come to that. I know how he
will act, and what they will do when the time arrives. Perhaps they will
bundle us both out of Russia, Lois, thankful to see the back of us."

She shook her head, looking up to him with a wild face.

"I would not go, Alb dear. Not while my father is a prisoner. Who is
there to work for him, if I don't? No, my dear, I must not think of it.
I have my duty to do whatever comes. But you, it is different for you,
Alban, you would be right to go."

He answered her hotly with a boyish phrase, conventional but true.

"You would make a coward of me, Lois," he said, "just a coward like the
others. But I am not going to let you. You left me once before; I have
never forgotten that. You went to Russia, and forgot that we had ever
been friends. Was that very kind, was it your true self that did so?
I'll never believe, unless you say so now."

She sat a little apart from him, regarding him wistfully as though she
wondered greatly at his accusation.

"You went to live in