Page:Top-Notch Magazine, May 1 1915 (IA tn 1915 05 01).pdf/91

 spies, without trial of any sort—father's friends could discover only that the name of his betrayer was Valerian Urth—father was sentenced to solitary confinement in an underground cell for life. And my mother—because she sent food and fagots to a supposed convict—was exiled to Siberia! Ten years ago, her sister, who took me, received word that she died on the convict island of Sakhalin; but my father"—she gasped for breath—"lived, at least!"

She stopped as suddenly as she had begun. Trant, who had stooped to watch his records more closely when the name of the police spy was mentioned, still kept his gaze steadfastly upon his instruments. Suddenly he motioned to the girl to complete her narrative.

"Some years ago," she said, "when I was eighteen, I left my mother's sister and went back to my father's friends, such of them as were still free," she continued. "Many who had worked with him for the organization had been caught or betrayed. But others and more had come in their places; and they had work for me. I might move about with less suspicion than a man. So I helped prepare for the strikes which at last so terrified the czar that on the thirtieth of October he issued his manifesto to free those in prison. I had helped to free my father with the rest. I took him to Hungary and left him with friends while I came here. Now, do you not understand why I am going back?" She turned in pitiful appeal to young Edwards. "It is because there is work again in Russia for me to do."

She checked herself again and turned to Trant to see if he would force her still to proceed. But he was facing intently, as if fascinated, the strange hammering man and his two stranger companions; yet he was not watching their faces or their figures at all. His eyes followed the little pencil points which, before each of the three, continually traced their lines of record. Then he took quickly from his pocket a folded paper, yellow with age, worn, creased, and pierced with pin marks. In the sight of all he unfolded it swiftly upon the table before the three, refolded it, and put it back into his pocket. And though at sight of it no face changed among the three, even Trant's clients could see how one line now suddenly grew flat, with low elevations, irregular and far apart, as the pencil point seemed almost to stop its motion over the smoked paper of the man in the middle, Meyan.

"That is all," said Trant, in a tone of assured triumph, as he unstrapped the sphygmographs from their wrists. "You can speak now, Mr. Edwards."

"Eva!" cried Winton Edwards in wild appeal. "You are not married to this man?"

"Married? No!" the girl exclaimed in horror. "Until last Thursday, when he came to the office, I never saw him. But he has come to call me for the cause which must be to me higher and holier than love. I must leave my love for the cause of Russia. I must go and nurse our soldiers on the battlefield. I have been promised a full pardon if I will do so."

Meyan now, with a heavy slouch of his muscular body, left his two companions at the table and moved up beside the girl. "Have any more of you anything to say to her before she goes back with me to Russia?"

"To her? No," Trant replied. "But to you—and to these gentlemen"—he motioned to the two who had sat at the table with Meyan—"I have to announce the result of my test, for which they are waiting. This elder gentleman is Ivan Munikov, who was forced to leave Russia eight years ago because his pamphlet on 'Inalienable Rights' had incurred the displeasure of the police. This younger man is Dmitri Vasili, who