were obliged to be extremely cautious, and not
to meet too often. A few furtive interviews now and again for the
interchange of news, a few sparsely attended rendezvous for the purpose
of keeping the threads of our organisation together, were pretty nearly
all that we thought safe to permit ourselves. This mode of life--so
tranquil to outward appearance, but in reality so full of anxiety for
each and all; a life without a to-morrow, so that when we parted we did
not know whether we should ever meet again, and it became our habit to
say _Adieu_ instead of _Au revoir_--lasted for me about five months.
Melancholy enough, indeed, it had notwithstanding a charm of its own, a
charm that sprang partly, perhaps, from the consciousness of dangers
incurred for a noble object, and from the feeling of grave moral
responsibility that we all had. A few episodes of that time are deeply
fixed in my memory. A meeting we held one evening at twilight in a rich
park near the town, a park that belonged to a high personage at the
Imperial Court, whose son was one of us. There we met and whispered, and
the murmur of the leaves overhead and the deepening shadows of the
nightfall lent an intense colour of poetry to the situation. And then
another meeting, in the poor little lodging of a factory-operative--a
special meeting, called because our suspicions of treason within our own
ranks had centred now upon a certain individual, a student, a college
friend of my cousins, a constant visitor at our house. At this meeting a
plan was adopted to test our suspect, and prove whether or not he was
the guilty man. I, the next time he called, was to put him on a false
scent; I was to tell him that a reunion of Nihilists would be held at a
given place and a given time; and then we would await developments. I
was also to draw him out, if possible, and make him convict himself from
his own mouth. But this I could not do. I put him on the false scent;
but I couldn't draw him out. It is terrible to hold the life of a human
being between your hands, even though that human being be the basest of
cowards and traitors.

Well, at the time and place that I told him of, surely enough, the
police turned up, and naturally they found nobody there. But during the
two following nights twenty fresh arrests took place; and I was one of
those arrested. My cousins' friend, feeling himself discovered and
menaced, had made haste to deliver us into the hands of our enemies!

[Il