l of
fear and tenderness, upon my face, and kept stroking my hand with her
two trembling ones.

[Illustration: "A LAMP HELD BY A BIG GENDARME."]

The search was nearly over, when a gendarme came in from the stable with
a great parcel of books, done up in green cloth, which he laid before
the Colonel. Opened, the parcel proved to contain not books only, but
_forbidden_ books--books by Herbert Spencer, by Mr. Ruskin, by Monsieur
Renan! I was astonished at seeing them, and my first thought was that
they belonged to my brother, who might have forgotten them there in the
stable, or to my cousins, who, without being revolutionists, were
interested in forbidden literature just because it was forbidden. So
when the Colonel, having finished his inspection of them, asked me whom
they belonged to, I answered quietly, "To me." My aunt Vera, to whom I
had always promised never to bring "forbidden" things into the house,
looked at me sadly, reproachfully. Ah! my dear aunt, I lied in saying
they were mine; but in my situation a few forbidden books couldn't
matter much; whereas for the others, for my innocent cousins--who knows
what serious trouble they might have got them into?

The Colonel demanded, "Where do these books come from?"

"From the people who had them last."

"Their names?"

"What, Colonel! You, the chief of the secret police of X----, you don't
know!"

This answer kindled a light of anger in his little Chinese eyes. For my
part, I had spoken very slowly, looking steadily at him, and smiling as
if it were a jest; but it wasn't exactly a jest. While the Colonel had
been questioning me, I had reflected. It was impossible that my cousins
should have had books of this sort in their possession without speaking
to me about them; and it was most unlikely that they could have belonged
to Serge, who, always very careful, made it a strict rule never to bring
anything of a compromising nature to our uncle's house. But I had often
heard that the political police, to create evidence against people whom
they strongly suspected, but who were too prudent for their taste, and
also to make their arrests appear less arbitrary in the eyes of the
public, had a pleasant habit of bringing "forbidden" things with them to
the houses where they made their perquisitions, for the sake of
supplying what they might not be able to find. Was this what had
happened now? Had I been caught in such a trap?

That was what I asked the Colonel in the