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362 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.

and to-day, Ferrari, he is in his own peaceful rooms in an agricultural village away beyond the mountains, tended by a Siberian servant, and resigned, waiting for the end. As you so long regarded him as dead to me, as I have so long accepted that position, so he has regarded us, dead Ferrari, dead ! If I should see him again it would be a foretaste of Paradise for him, for me perhaps."

"It is this romantic attachment of yours to Forsyth that has unnerved you."

11 Then I thank him for it, on my knees, Ferrari. If he has relighted that human lamp within my breast which shows me the past in the present, what humanly I was, then thank God, Ferrari, for his interposition."

" So it do not cast its betraying light upon the forth- coming enterprise of the Brotherhood, I am willing to say 1 Amen ' to that. I can find in my own heart, Anna Klosstock, one drop of patience, when I remember that it was I who brought down upon your father's house the hand of persecution and murder ; that it was I who made the trail of death, of the sword and fire which the Chris- tian friends followed to the peaceful streets of the Czar- ovna settlement."

" You have had your revenge, Ferrari, and I mine."

" No, no, my sister. I have no love-tokens of the past, no young English woman to revive it if I had. My ven- geance is never complete. No woman can come between me and my oath, between me and my righteous ambition, between me and my sacred duty, as Philip Forsyth comes between me and yours."

" I will not have it so, Ferrari ; and I claim your firm and faithful allegiance to me, an allegiance not of oaths or vows, but of mutual suffering and mutual wrong. If it has pleased our Father Abraham that in this alliance of ours the woman at last shall be weaker than the man, do not blame me. Judge of me in the future as you have known