muttered to himself. "How did I get
here?"

Then gradually the events of the night before came to his mind. There
had been a terrible fight. Akim had been killed. There had been a
tremendous explosion. The police had something to do with it. Was it all
a dream, or was it real? Was he dreaming now? He was some time before he
could persuade himself that it was all real, and indeed it was not until
the door opened and two men entered that he felt quite sure that he,
Godfrey Bullen, was really lying there in a prison cell, with a dull
numbing pain at the back of his head, and too weak even to sit upright.
One of the men leaned over him. Godfrey tried to speak, but could not do
so above a whisper.

"He will do now," the man said without paying any attention to his
words. "He must have a thick skull or that sword-cut would have finished
him. Give him some wine and water now, and some soup presently. We must
not let him slip through our fingers."

Some liquid was poured between his lips, and then he was left alone
again. "Certainly it is all real," he said to himself. "Akim must have
been killed, and I must be a prisoner. What in the world can it be all
about?" He was too weak to think, but after another visit had been paid
him, and he had been lifted up and given some strong broth, he began to
think more clearly. "Can it have been a Nihilist arrest?" he thought to
himself. "Akim and Petroff can never be Nihilists. The idea is absurd. I
have never heard them say a word against the government or the Czar."

Then he thought of their friend Katia, and how she had got him to aid in
the escape of a Nihilist. "It is all nonsense," he murmured, "the idea
of a girl like that being mixed up in a conspiracy." Then his ideas
again became more and more confused, and when the doctor visited him
again in the evening he was in a state of high fever, talking
incoherently to himself. For seven days he continued in that state.
There was no lack of care; the doctor visited him at very short
intervals, and an attendant remained night and day beside him, applying
cold bandages to his head, and carefully noting down in a book every
word that passed his lips. Then a good constitution gradually triumphed
over the fever, and on the eighth day he lay a mere shadow of himself,
but cool and sensible, on a bed in an airy ward. Nourishing food was
given to him in abundance, but it was another week before he was able to
stand alone. Then one morning two