the men of whom Luka had been speaking. Kobylin
the bandit muttered and scowled whenever the starosta came near him, and
there could be little doubt that had he met him outside the prison walls
he would have shown him no mercy. Koshkin on the other hand appeared to
cherish no enmity.

"I have done wrong, Mikail," he said half an hour after he had had his
flogging, "and I have been punished for it. It was not your fault; it
was mine. These things will happen, you know, and there is no need for
malice;" and he went about the ward smiling and rubbing his hands as
usual and occasionally singing softly to himself. As Godfrey knew how
submissive the Russians are under punishment he would have thought this
perfectly natural had he not heard from Luka the man's history. That was
how, he thought to himself, the scoundrel smiled upon the master and
mistress he had resolved to murder. "Of the two I think there is more to
be feared from him than from that villain Kobylin, who has certainly
been civil enough to me since I gave him that thrashing. I will keep my
eye on the little fellow."

Of necessity the ward became quiet very soon after night set in. The men
talked and smoked for a short time, but in an hour after the candle was
lit the ward was generally perfectly quiet. Godfrey, working as he did
indoors, was far less inclined for sleep than either the men who had
been working in the forest or those who had been listlessly passing the
day in enforced idleness, and he generally lay awake for a long time,
either thinking of home and school-days, or in meditating over his plans
for escape as soon as spring arrived, and he now determined to keep
awake still longer. "They are almost all asleep by seven o'clock," he
said to himself. "If any of those fellows intend to do any harm to
Mikail they will probably do it by ten or eleven, there will be no
motive in putting it off longer; and indeed the ward is quieter then
than it is later, for some of them when they wake light a pipe and have
a smoke, and many do so early in the morning so as to have their smoke
before going to work."

Five evenings passed without anything happening, and Godfrey began to
think that he had been needlessly anxious, and that Mikail must
understand the ways of his own people better than he did. The sixth
evening had also passed off quietly, and when Godfrey thought that it
must be nearly twelve o'clock he was about to pull his blanket up over
his ear and sett