sked.

For some time there was no reply, but after a while Sigismund rapped
faintly the despairing words:--

"Dead beat!"

Valerian felt the tears start to his eyes. It was what he had all along
expected, and for a time grief and indignation and his miserable
helplessness made him almost beside himself. At last he remembered that
there was at least one thing in his power. Each day he was escorted by a
warder to a tiny square, walled off in the exercising ground, and was
allowed to walk for a few minutes; he would take this opportunity of
begging the warder to get the doctor for his friend.

But unfortunately the doctor did not think very seriously of Zaluski's
case. In that dreary prison he had patients in the last stages of all
kinds of disease, and Sigismund, who had been in confinement too short a
time to look as ill as the others, did not receive much attention.
Certainly, the doctor admitted, his lungs were affected; probably the
sudden change of climate and the lack of good food and fresh air had been
too much for him; so the solemn farce ended, and he was left to his fate.
"If I were indeed a Nihilist, and suffered for a cause which I had at
heart," he telegraphed to Valerian, "I could bear it better. But to be
kept here for an imaginary offence, to bear cold and hunger and illness
all to no purpose--that beats me. There can't be a God, or such things
would not be allowed."

"To me it seems," said Valerian, "that we are the victims of violated
law. Others have shown tyranny, or injustice, or cruelty, and we are the
victims of their sin. Don't say there is no God. There must be a God to
avenge such hideous wrong."

So they spoke to each other through their prison wall as men in the free
outer world seldom care to speak; and I, who knew no barriers, looked now
on Valerian's gaunt figure, and brave but prematurely old face, now on
poor Zaluski, who, in his weary imprisonment, had wasted away till one
could scarcely believe that he was indeed the same lithe, active fellow
who had played tennis at Mrs. Courtenay's garden-party.

Day and night Valerian listened to the terrible cough which came from the
adjoining cell. It became perfectly apparent to him that his friend was
dying; he knew it as well as if he had seen the burning hectic flush on
his hollow cheeks, and heard the panting, hurried breaths, and watched
the unnatural brilliancy of his dark eyes.

At length he thought the time had come for a