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 “What—what are you saying?” Prokop ground his teeth. “I know what I’m saying. The idea was that that I should give you Krakatit, eh? They’re getting ready for a war, and you, you,” he cried, “you are their tool! You and your love! You and your marriage, you spy! And I—I was to be lured into it so that you could kill, so that you could avenge yourselves”

She sank into a chair with her eyes wide open with horror; her whole body was shaken by a terrible dry sob. He wanted to throw himself upon her, but she prevented him with a movement of her frozen hand.

“Who are you?” Prokop ground out. “You are a princess? Who persuaded you to this? Do you realize, you worthless creature, that you would have killed thousands and thousands of men, that you would have helped them to destroy cities, and that our world, our world and not yours, would have been obliterated! Obliterated, smashed to fragments, wiped out! Why did you do it?” he cried, and fell on his knees and crawled towards her. “What did you want to do?”

She raised to him a face full of horror and aversion and edged away from him. He bent his face over the spot where she had been sitting and began to cry with the heavy, crude sobs of a raw youth. She would have knelt next to him, but controlled the impulse to do so and retreated still further, pressing her convulsively twisted fingers to her breast. “So,” she whispered, “this is what you think?”.

Prokop was being suffocated by the weight of his pain. “Do you know,” he cried, “what war is?