He could not give them money, because the tax-collector had them all
under his thumb and would exact the last kopeck. The question was far
above his single-handed reach, and he did not dare to meet it openly and
seek the assistance of the few fellow-nobles who faced the position
without fear.

He could not see in the brutal faces before him one spark of
intelligence, one little gleam of independence and self-respect which
could be attributed to his endeavor; which the most sanguine
construction could take as resulting from his time and money given to a
hopeless cause.

"Well," he said. "Have you nothing to tell me of your prince?"

"You know him," answered the man who had spoken from the safe
background. "We need not tell you."

"Yes," answered Paul; "I know him."

He would not defend himself.

"There," he went on, addressing the man whose hand was now bandaged.
"You will do. Keep clean and sober, and it will heal. Get drunk and go
dirty, and you will die. Do you understand, Ivan Ivanovitch?"

The man grunted sullenly, and moved away to give place to a woman with a
baby in her arms.

Paul glanced into her face. He had known her a few years earlier a happy
child playing at her mother's cottage door.

She drew back the shawl that covered her child, with a faint, far-off
gleam of pride in her eyes. There was something horribly pathetic in the
whole picture. The child-mother, her rough, unlovely face lighted for a
moment with that gleam from Paradise which men never know; the huge man
bending over her, and between them the wizened, disease-stricken little
waif of humanity.

"When he was born he was a very fine child," said the mother.

Paul glanced at her. She was quite serious. She was looking at him with
a strange pride on her face. Paul nodded and drew aside the shawl. The
baby was staring at him with wise, grave eyes, as if it could have told
him a thing or two if it had only been gifted with the necessary speech.
Paul knew that look. It meant starvation.

"What is it?" asked the child-mother. "It is only some little illness,
is it not?"

"Yes; it is only a little illness."

He did not add that no great illness is required to kill a small child.
He was already writing something in his pocket-book. He tore the leaf
out and gave it to her.

"This," he said, "is for you--yourself, you understand? Take that each
day to the starosta and he will give you what I have written down. If
you do not eat all th