station at the half-closed door at nightfall. And it is so all
through the town. It is a Russian custom, imported among others into
the free kingdom of Poland, when the great empire of the north cast
the shadow of its protecting wing over the land that is watered by
the Vistula. So, no man may come or go in Warsaw without having his
movements carefully noted by one who is directly responsible to the
authorities for the good name of the house under his care.

"The poet is in. There is a letter up-stairs," said the door-keeper to
Cartoner, as he passed in. Cartoner's servant was out, and the lamps
were turned low when he entered his sitting-room. He knew that the
letter must be the reply to his application for a recall. He turned
up the lamp, and, taking the letter from the table where it lay in a
prominent position, sat down in a deep chair to read it at leisure.

It bore no address, and prattled of the crops. Some of it seemed to be
nonsense. Cartoner read it slowly and carefully. It was an order, in
brief and almost brutal language, to stay where he was and do the work
intrusted to him. For a man who writes in a code must perforce avoid
verbosity.

XV

A TALE HALF TOLD

The heart soon accustoms itself to that existence which is called living
upon a volcano. Prince Bukaty had indeed known no other life, and to
such as had daily intercourse with him he was quite a peaceful and
jovial gentleman. He had brought up his children in the same atmosphere
of strife and peril, and it is to be presumed that the fit had survived,
while the unfit princess, his wife, had turned her face to the wall
quite soon, not daring to meet the years in which there could be no hope
of alleviation.

The prince's friends were not in Warsaw; many were at the mines. Some
lived in Paris; others were exiled to distant parts of Russia. His
generation was slowly passing away, and its history is one of the
grimmest stories untold. Yet he sat in that bare drawing-room of a poor
man and read his _Figaro_ quite placidly, like any bourgeois in the
safety of the suburb, only glancing at the clock from time to time.

"He is late," he said once, as he folded the paper, and that was all.

It was nearly eleven o'clock, and Martin had been expected to return
to dinner at half-past six. Wanda was working, and she, too, glanced
towards the clock at intervals. She was always uneasy about Martin,
whose daring was rather of the reckless type, whose geniu