s objects--had been before.

A deep, trembling voice said something loudly. Then the doctor was
hastily summoned by telephone; the dignitary was collapsing. The wife of
his Excellency was also called.

CHAPTER II CONDEMNED TO BE HANGED

Everything befell as the police had foretold. Four terrorists, three
men and a woman, armed with bombs, infernal machines and revolvers, were
seized at the very entrance of the house, and another woman was later
found and arrested in the house where the conspiracy had been hatched.
She was its mistress. At the same time a great deal of dynamite and
half finished bomb explosives were seized. All those arrested were very
young; the eldest of the men was twenty-eight years old, the younger
of the women was only nineteen. They were tried in the same fortress in
which they were imprisoned after the arrest; they were tried swiftly and
secretly, as was done during that unmerciful time.

At the trial all of them were calm, but very serious and thoughtful.
Their contempt for the judges was so intense that none of them wished
to emphasize his daring by even a superfluous smile or by a feigned
expression of cheerfulness. Each was simply as calm as was necessary to
hedge in his soul, from curious, evil and inimical eyes, the great gloom
that precedes death.

Sometimes they refused to answer questions; sometimes they answered,
briefly, simply and precisely, as though they were answering not the
judge, but statisticians, for the purpose of supplying information for
particular special tables. Three of them, one woman and two men, gave
their real names, while two others refused and thus remained unknown to
the judges.

They manifested for all that was going on at the trial a certain
curiosity, softened, as though through a haze, such as is peculiar
to persons who are very ill or are carried away by some great,
all-absorbing idea. They glanced up occasionally, caught some word in
the air more interesting than the others, and then resumed the thought
from which their attention had been distracted.

The man who was nearest to the judges called himself Sergey Golovin, the
son of a retired colonel, himself an ex-officer. He was still a very
young, light-haired, broad-shouldered man, so strong that neither the
prison nor the expectation of inevitable death could remove the color
from his cheeks and the expression of youthful, happy frankness from his
blue eyes. He kept energetically tugging at h