th to Wanda. He
walked slowly back towards the double doors. He might even gain a minute
there, he thought, by simulating clumsiness with the handle should any
one wish to enter in haste. He was at the outer door when a man hurried
up the steps. This was a small man, with a pale and gentle face, and
eyes in which a dull light seemed to smoulder.

Cartoner detained him on the step for quite half a minute by
persistently turning the handle the wrong way. When at length he was
allowed to enter, he swore at the Englishman in a low voice as he
passed, which Captain Cable would have recognized had he heard it. The
two men looked at each other in the twilight between the doors. Each
knew that the other knew. Then the little man passed in. The front of
his black coat had a white stain upon it, as if he had been holding
a loaf of bread under his arm. Cartoner noticed it, and remembered it
afterwards, when he learned that the bombs which seem to have been sown
broadcast in the streets of St. Petersburg that day were painted white.

He crossed the square to the Winter Palace, and stood with the silent
crowd there until the bells told all Petersburg the news that the
mightiest monarch had been called to stand before a greater than any
earthly throne.

XXXII

A LOVE-LETTER

The next morning Miss Netty Cahere took her usual walk in the Saski
Gardens. It was much warmer at Warsaw than at St. Petersburg, and the
snow had melted, except where it lay in gray heaps on either side of the
garden walks. The trees were not budding yet, but the younger bark of
the small branches was changing color. The first hidden movements of
spring were assuredly astir, and Netty felt kindly towards all mankind.

She wished at times that there were more people in Warsaw to be kind to.
It is dull work being persistently amiable to one's elderly relatives.
Netty sometimes longed for a little more excitement, especially,
perhaps, for the particular form of excitement which leads one-half of
the world to deck itself in bright colors in the spring for the greater
pleasure of the other half.

She wished that Cartoner would come back; for he was an unsolved problem
to her, and there had been very few unsolved male problems in her brief
experience. She had usually found men very easy to understand, and the
failure to achieve her simple purpose in this instance aroused, perhaps,
an additional attention. She thought it was that, but she was not quite
s