before the bed,
where rumbled now, like the bellows of a forge, the respiration of the
sleeper. Matrena grasped Rouletabille by the hand. And she had already
hurried him into the dressing-room when a moan stopped them.

"The youth of Moscow is dead!"

It was the sleeper speaking. The mouth which had given the stringent
orders moaned. And the lamentation was still a menace. In the haunted
sleep thrust upon that man by the inadequate narcotic the words Feodor
Feodorovitch spoke were words of mourning and pity. This perfect fiend
of a soldier, whom neither bullets nor bombs could intimidate, had a way
of saying words which transformed their meaning as they came from his
terrible mouth. The listeners could not but feel absorbed in the tones
of the brutal victor.

Matrena Petrovna and Rouletabille had leant their two shadows, blended
one into the other, against the open doorway just beyond the gleam of
the night-lamp, and they heard with horror:

"The youth of Moscow is dead! They have cleared away the corpses. There
is nothing but ruin left. The Kremlin itself has shut its gates--that it
may not see. The youth of Moscow is dead!"

Feodor Feodorovitch's fist shook above his bed; it seemed that he was
about to strike, to kill again, and Rouletabille felt Matrena trembling
against him, while he trembled as well before the fearful vision of the
killer in the Red Week!

Feodor heaved an immense sigh and his breast descended under the
bed-clothes, the fist relaxed and fell, the great head lay over on its
ear. There was silence. Had he repose at last? No, no. He sighed, he
choked anew, he tossed on his couch like the damned in torment, and
the words written by his daughter--by his daughter--blazed in his eyes,
which now were wide open--words written on the wall, that he read on the
wall, written in blood.

"The youth of Moscow is dead! They had gone so young into the
fields and into the mines,
And they had not found a single corner of the Russian land where
there were not moanings.
Now the youth of Moscow is dead and no more moanings are heard,
Because those for whom all youth died do not dare even to moan
any more.

But--what? The voice of Feodor lost its threatening tone. His breath
came as from a weeping child. And it was with sobs in his throat that he
said the last verse, the verse written by his daughter in the album, in
red letters:

"The last barricade had standing there the girl of