ld. Had an historian been called upon to deal with such
documents, he would have made nothing whatever of them--but Richard
Gessner could rewrite the story in every line, could garnish it with
passions awakened, fears unnamable, regrets that could not save, despair
that would suffer no consolations.

He had stolen Paul Boriskoff's secret from him and thereby had made a
fortune. Let it be admitted that the first conception of the new furnace
for the refining of copper had come from that white-faced whimpering
miner, who could talk of nothing but his nation's wrongs and had no
finer ambition in life than to feed his children. He, Richard Gessner,
had done what such a fellow never could have done. He had made the
furnace commercially possible and had exploited it through the copper
mines of the world. Such had been the first rung of that magnificent
pecuniary ladder he had afterwards climbed so adroitly. Money he had
amassed beneath his grasping hand as at a magician's touch. He
regretted, he had always regretted, that misfortune overtook Paul
Boriskoff's family--he would have helped them had he been in Poland at
the time; but their offences were adjudged to be political; and if the
wretched woman suffered harm at the hands of the police, what share had
he in it? To this point he charged himself lightly--as men will in
justifying themselves before the finger of an hoary accusation. Gessner
cared neither for God nor man. His only daughter had been at once his
divinity and his religion. Let men call him a rogue, despot, or thief,
and he would shrug his shoulders and glance aside at his profit and loss
account. But let them call him "fool" and the end of his days surely was
at hand.

And so this self-examination to-night troubled itself with no thought of
wrongs committed, with no desire to repay, but only with that supreme
act of folly, to which the sleeping lad in the room near by was the
surest witness. What would the threats of such a pauper as Paul
Boriskoff have mattered if the man had stood alone against him? A word
to the police, a hundred pounds to a score of ruffians, and he would
have been troubled no more. But his quarrel was not with a man but a
nation. Perceiving that the friendship of the Russian Government was
necessary to many of his mining schemes in the East, he had changed his
name as lightly as another would have changed his coat, had cast the
garments of a sham patriotism and emerged an enemy to all tha