spering in
skilful and honest hands. I was richer in wealth than I had ever
been, and in happiness poorer than a beggar, while the shadow of that
awful uncertainty hung over me.

"I could not believe the official story, for the search along the
Siberian road had been too complete not to have revealed evidences of
the catastrophe of which it told when the snows melted, and none such
were ever found.

"At length one night, just as I was going to bed, I was told that a
man who would not give his name insisted on seeing me on business
that he would tell no one but myself. All that he would say was that
he came from Russia. That was enough. I ordered him to be admitted.

"He was a stranger, ragged and careworn, and his face was stamped
with the look of sullen, unspeakable misery that men's faces only
wear in one part of the world.

"'You are from Siberia,' I said, stretching out my hand to him.
'Welcome, fellow-sufferer! Have you news for me?'

"'Yes, I am from Siberia,' he replied, taking my hand; 'an escaped
Nihilist convict from the mines. I have been four years getting from
Kara to London, else you should have had my news sooner. I fear it is
sad enough, but what else could you expect from the Russian
prison-land? Here it is.'

"As he spoke, he gave me an envelope, soiled and stained with long
travel, and my heart stood still as I recognised in the blurred
address the handwriting of my long-lost wife.

"With trembling fingers I opened it, and through my tears I read a
letter that my dear one had written to me on her deathbed four years
before.

"It has lain next my heart ever since, and every word is burnt into
my brain, to stand there against the day of vengeance. But I have
never told their full tale of shame and woe to mortal ears, nor ever
can.

"Let it suffice to say that my wife was beautiful with a beauty that
is rare among the daughters of men; that a woman's honour is held as
cheaply in the wildernesses of Siberia as is the life of a man who is
a convict.

"The official story of her death was false--false as are all the ten
thousand other lies that have come out of that abode of oppression
and misery, and she whom I mourned would have been well-favoured of
heaven if she had died in the snowdrifts, as they said she did,
rather than in the shame and misery to which her brutal destroyer
brought her.

"He was an official of high rank, and he had had the power to cover
his crime from the knowledge of