hope meant to her; but there was no idea
of concealing the same thing from herself. As the days passed and Ivan
did not come, she grew almost frightened at her own disappointment,
discovering only now, perhaps, that there could never be any other man
in her life who could make her feel the extremes of emotion. In two
weeks she had gone through every stage from eager expectation to apathy;
and then, suddenly, during the last, vague flicker of dying hope--he
came; and her life grew red again. She was even content that he should
evince most interest in men--her brother and the fellow-students that
thronged their rooms at all hours. Of these, one and all regarded the
visitor as a great and wealthy personage; and yet none could long remain
unfriendly before the gay simplicity which speedily made Ivan as one of
them. By rapid degrees their intercourse became intimate; and Ivan
believed that their minds, their dreams, their trials, were as open to
him as his to them. If they were not, if their secret hopes and the
all-powerful reason for their community spirit remained sedulously
concealed, this was, in truth, still greater proof of their friendship
for him; for there were few of the hated upper class that they would
have scrupled to use in their own way for their own purposes.

It was odd, perhaps, that Ivan never perceived how often his entrance
into their rooms stopped or turned the conversation; though perhaps much
personal sacrifice had been made for that meeting. They had all come to
be proud of the young composer's fondness for them; and they held a
tacit agreement that he should never, through them, be placed in danger.
For, though Ivan saw it not, the shadow of the rope, or of the distant,
frozen, Siberian mines, hung over this little band of youths by day and
by night, sleeping and waking. He had fallen upon the very centre of the
first students' brotherhood: an alliance formed a few years before,
during that unique revolution of Russian youth which resulted in the
birth of Nihilism.

It was about the year 1860, when the question of abolition was shaking
the Bear from head to tail, that this unique movement began. By some
obscure trait of national heritage, there sprang up, almost at the same
hour, through the mediaeval gloom that still enveloped Peter's Empire, a
thousand points of unwonted light. They were to be found burning at once
in the twilight of isolated manors and the midnight of the serf's hut:
in the cit