ions, never spoken to a
political prisoner when in the hospital except to ask him medical
questions, and had never opened my lips on politics to a soul there."

"I think perhaps I can enlighten you," Godfrey said; and he related to
him the attempt to blow up the emperor at the Winter Palace, and the
fate of Petroff Stepanoff and Akim Soushiloff.

"That does indeed explain it," Alexis said. "I was very intimate with
both of them, and it is quite enough to have been intimate with two men
engaged in a plot against the life of the Czar to ensure one a visit to
Siberia. So that is it! I have thought of everything, and it seemed to
me that it must have been something at St. Petersburg--that my name had
been found on a list when some of the Nihilists were arrested, or
something of that sort; for I certainly did join them, but that was
before there was any idea of taking steps against the Czar. No wonder
you are here, after being mixed up in that escape of Valerian Ossinsky,
and then being caught again with four Nihilists just after that terrible
attempt to blow up the Czar. I wonder they did not hang you."

"I wonder too," Godfrey said. "I suppose if I had been a year or two
older they would have done so; but I can assure you I had not the
slightest idea that Petroff and Akim were Nihilists. I do think that the
country is horribly misgoverned, but as a foreigner that was no business
of mine; and however strongly I felt, I would have had nothing to do
with men who tried to gain their end by assassination. I was just as
innocent in the affair of Ossinsky. I behaved like a fool, I grant, but
that was all. I had met the woman, who as I now know was Sophia
Perovskaia, but she was only known to me then from having met her once
in Petroff and Akim's room, and she was introduced to me as Akim's
cousin Katia. I met her at the Opera-house, and she told me a
cock-and-bull story about a young officer who had come to see a lady
there, and had left his regiment at Moscow without leave to do so. His
colonel, who was at the Opera-house, had heard of his being there and
was looking for him, and I was persuaded to change dominoes with him to
enable him to slip off."

"Oh that was it!" Alexis said. "I wondered how you got mixed up in the
affair, and still more why they let you out after your having been
caught in what they considered a serious business. Well, here we are,
victims both, and it is a curious chance that has thrown us together
a