trance to check a visitor--men entered Gounsovski's house as the house
of a friend, and he was always ready to do you a service, certainly!

He accompanied the reporter to the stairs. Rouletabille was just about
to risk speaking of Annouchka to him, in order to approach the subject
of Natacha, when Gounsovski said suddenly, with a singular smile:

"By the way, do you still believe in Natacha Trebassof?"

"I shall believe in her until my death," Rouletabille thrust back; "but
I admit to you that at this moment I don't know where she has gone."

"Watch the Bay of Lachtka, and come to tell me to-morrow if you will
believe in her always," replied Gounsovski, confidentially, with a
horrid sort of laugh that made the reporter hurry down the stairs.

And now here was Priemkof to look after! Priemkof after Matiew!
It seemed to the young man that he had to contend against all the
revolutionaries not only, but all the Russian police as well--and
Gounsovski himself, and Koupriane! Everybody, everybody! But most
urgent was Priemkof and his living bombs. What a strange and almost
incomprehensible and harassing adventure this was between Nihilism and
the Russian police. Koupriane and Gounsovski both employed a man they
knew to be a revolutionary and the friend of revolutionaries. Nihilism,
on its side, considered this man of the police force as one of its
own agents. In his turn, this man, in order to maintain his perilous
equilibrium, had to do work for both the police and the revolutionaries,
and accept whatever either gave him to do as it came, because it
was necessary he should give them assurances of his fidelity. Only
imbeciles, like Gapone, let themselves be hanged or ended by being
executed, like Azef, because of their awkward slips. But a Priemkof,
playing both branches of the police, had a good chance of living a long
time, and a Gounsovski would die tranquilly in his bed with all the
solaces of religion.

However, the young hearts hot with sincerity, sheathed with dynamite,
are mysteriously moved in the atrocious darkness of Holy Russia, and
they do not know where they will be sent, and it is all one to them,
because all they ask is to die in a mad spiritual delirium of hate
and love--living bombs!*

* In the trial after the revolt at Cronstadt two young women
were charged with wearing bombs as false bosoms.

At the corner of Aptiekarski-Pereoulok Rouletabille came in the way
of Koupriane, who was leaving