and many
houses were, like ours, turned into temporary hospitals. But I gathered
that comparatively few of Anne's most influential colleagues were in
sympathy with her efforts to mitigate the horrors that surrounded us.
In that way, we, her own chosen band, worked almost alone. Most
of the revolutionists were as callous, as brutal, as the Cossacks
themselves,--women as well as men. They would march in procession,
waving banners and singing patriotic songs, and, when the inevitable
collision with the soldiers came, they would fight like furies, and die
with a laugh of defiance on their lips. But those who came through,
unscathed, had neither care nor sympathy to bestow on the fallen.

"I join your band of nurses?" a handsome vivacious little
woman--evidently one of her own rank--said to Anne one day, with a
scornful laugh. "I am no good at such work. Give me real work to do, a
bomb to throw, a revolver to fire; I have that at least"--she touched
her fur blouse significantly. "I want to fight--to kill--and if I am
killed instead, well, it is but the fortune of war! But nursing--bah--I
have not the patience! You are far too tender-hearted, Anna Petrovna;
you ought to have been a nun; but what would our handsome Loris have
done then? Oh, it is all right, _ma chere_; I am quite discreet. But do
you suppose I have not recognized him?"

Anne looked troubled.

"And others,--do they recognize him?" she asked quietly.

"Who knows? We are too busy these days to think or care who any one is
or is not. Besides, he is supposed to be dead; it was cleverly planned,
that bomb affair! Was it your doing, Anna? He is too stupidly honest to
have thought of it himself. There! Do not look so vexed, and have no
fear that I shall denounce him. He is far too good-looking! You have a
_penchant_ for good-looking men," she added, with an audacious glance in
my direction.

It happened for once that Anne and I were alone together, until Madame
Levinska turned up, in the room that was used as an office, and where
between-whiles I did a good bit of secretarial work. That small untidy
room represented the bureau from which the whole of this section of the
League was controlled, practically by that slender, pale-faced girl in
the black gown, who sat gravely regarding her frivolous acquaintance.

Her grasp of affairs was as marvellous as her personal courage in time
of need; she was at once the head and the heart of the whole
organization.

I fe