ry passer-by
whose past and present life were alike unknown.

"I am leaving to-night," he said in a voice sharp like a knife.

"Are you going back to your home in Russia?" asked Guillaume.

A faint, disdainful smile appeared on the Anarchist's lips. "Home!" said
he, "I am at home everywhere. To begin with, I am not a Russian, and then
I recognise no other country than the world."

With a sweeping gesture he gave them to understand what manner of man he
was, one who had no fatherland of his own, but carried his gory dream of
fraternity hither and thither regardless of frontiers. From some words he
spoke the brothers fancied he was returning to Spain, where some
fellow-Anarchists awaited him. There was a deal of work to be done there,
it appeared. He had quietly seated himself, chatting on in his cold way,
when all at once he serenely added: "By the by, a bomb had just been
thrown into the Cafe de l'Univers on the Boulevard. Three _bourgeois_
were killed."

Pierre and Guillaume shuddered, and asked for particulars. Thereupon
Janzen related that he had happened to be there, had heard the explosion,
and seen the windows of the cafe shivered to atoms. Three customers were
lying on the floor blown to pieces. Two of them were gentlemen, who had
entered the place by chance and whose names were not known, while the
third was a regular customer, a petty cit of the neighbourhood, who came
every day to play a game at dominoes. And the whole place was wrecked;
the marble tables were broken, the chandeliers twisted out of shape, the
mirrors studded with projectiles. And how great the terror and the
indignation, and how frantic the rush of the crowd! The perpetrator of
the deed had been arrested immediately--in fact, just as he was turning
the corner of the Rue Caumartin.

"I thought I would come and tell you of it," concluded Janzen; "it is
well you should know it."

Then as Pierre, shuddering and already suspecting the truth, asked him if
he knew who the man was that had been arrested, he slowly replied: "The
worry is that you happen to know him--it was little Victor Mathis."

Pierre tried to silence Janzen too late. He had suddenly remembered that
Victor's mother had been sitting in a dark corner behind them a short
time previously. Was she still there? Then he again pictured Victor,
slight and almost beardless, with a straight, stubborn brow, grey eyes
glittering with intelligence, a pointed nose and thin lips expressive o