how glad I am to see you! I was breakfasting over
there, and my accursed paper must have hidden me. Ouf! If you only knew!
I am stifling!"

"Why, what is the matter?" asked Andras.

"Matter? Look at me! I must be as red as a beet!"

Poor Vogotzine had entered the restaurant for breakfast, regretting the
cool garden of Maisons-Lafitte, which, now that Marsa no longer sat
there, he had entirely to himself. After eating his usual copious
breakfast, he had imprudently asked the waiter for a Russian paper; and,
as he read, and sipped his kummel, which he found a little insipid and
almost made him regret the vodka of his native land, his eyes fell upon a
letter from Odessa, in which there was a detailed description of the
execution of three nihilists, two of them gentlemen. It told how they
were dragged, tied to the tails of horses, to the open square, each of
them bearing upon his breast a white placard with this inscription, in
black letters: "Guilty of high treason." Then the wretched General
shivered from head to foot. Every detail of the melodramatic execution
seemed burned into his brain as with a red-hot iron. He fancied he could
see the procession and the three gibbets, painted black; beside each
gibbet was an open ditch and a black coffin covered with a dark gray
pall. He saw, in the hollow square formed by a battalion of Cossack
infantry, the executioner, Froloff, in his red shirt and his plush
trousers tucked into his boots, and, beside him, a pale, black-robed
priest.

"Who the devil is such an idiot as to relate such things in the
newspapers?" he growled.

And in terror he imagined he could hear the sheriff read the sentence,
see the priest present the cross to the condemned men, and Froloff,
before putting on the black caps, degrade the gentlemen by breaking their
swords over their heads.

Then, half suffocated, Vogotzine flung the paper on the floor; and, with
eyes distended with horror, drawing the caraffe of kummel toward him, he
half emptied it, drinking glass after glass to recover his self-control.
It seemed to him that Froloff was there behind him, and that the branches
of the candelabra, stretching over his heated head, were the arms of
gibbets ready to seize him. To reassure himself, and be certain that he
was miles and miles from Russia, he was obliged to make sure of the
presence of the waiters and guests in the gay and gilded restaurant.

"The devil take the newspapers!" he muttered.

"The