nd you said nothing; you are discreet enough in your way. _He_ never
suspected,--does not even now; he thinks it was a plot hatched by his
enemies--perhaps by Stravensky himself, the old fox! But we should never
have got through to Warsaw, if, for a time, at least, all had not
believed that he and I and you were finished off in that affair. Better
for him perhaps, if it had been so!"

He fell silent, and I know he was thinking of the last tragedy, as I
was. The memory of it was hard enough for me to bear; what must it not
be for Loris?

"Yes, there was much trouble," Mishka resumed. "Old Stravensky was
summoned to Petersburg, and he had scarcely set out before the
revolution began, and the troops were recalled. There was but a small
garrison left; I doubt if they would have moved a finger in any case;
and so the _moujiks_ took their own way, and my father--went to his
reward. He was a good man, and their best friend for many a year, but
that they did not understand, since the Almighty has made them beasts
without understanding!"

The darkness had fallen, but I guessed he shrugged his shoulders in the
way I knew so well. A fatalist to the finger-tips was Mishka.

"The news came three days since," he continued. "And such news will
come, in time, from every country district. I tell you all you have seen
and known is but the beginning, and God knows what the end will be!
Therefore, as I have said, this is no country for honest peaceable folk.
My mother died long since, God be thanked; and now but one tie holds me
here."

"Look, yonder are the lights of Kutno."

The town was comparatively quiet, though it was thronged with soldiers,
and there were plenty of signs that Kutno had passed through its own
days of terror, and was probably in for more in the near future.

We left our horses at a _kabak_ and walked through the squalid streets
to the equally squalid railway depot where we parted, almost in silence.

"God be with you," Mishka growled huskily. His face looked more grim
than ever under the poor light of a street-lamp near, and he held my
hands in a grip whose marks I bore for a week after.

He strode heavily away, never once looking back, and I turned into the
depot, where I found the entrance, the ticket office, and the platform
guarded by surly, unkempt soldiers with fixed bayonets. I lost count of
the times I had to produce my passport; and turned a deaf ear to the
insults lavished upon me by most of my int