“You know Mademoiselle—­eh?” he asked in a hoarse, strained voice as he turned to me.  “You will help her to escape?”

“I will risk my own life in order to save hers,” I declared.

“And your devotion to her is prompted by what?” he inquired suspiciously.

I was silent for a moment.  Then I confessed the truth.

“My affection.”

“Ah!” he sighed deeply.  “Poor young lady!  She, who has enemies on every hand, sadly needs a friend.  But can we trust you—­have you no fear?”

“Of what?”

“Of being implicated in the coming revolution in Russia?  Remember I am the Red Priest.  Have you never heard of me?  My name is Otto Kampf.”

Otto Kampf!

I stood before him open-mouthed.  Who in Russia had not heard of that mysterious unknown person who had directed a hundred conspiracies against the Imperial Autocrat, and yet the identity of whom the police had always failed to discover.  It was believed that Kampf had once been professor of chemistry at Moscow University, and that he had invented that most terrible and destructive explosive used by the revolutionists.  The ingredients of the powerful compound and the mode of firing it was the secret of the Nihilists alone—­and Otto Kampf, the mysterious leader, whose personality was unknown even to the conspirators themselves, directed those constant attempts which held the Emperor and his Government in such hourly terror.

Rewards without number had been offered by the Ministry of the Interior for the betrayal and arrest of the unseen man whose power in Russia, permeating every class, was greater than that of the Emperor himself—­at whose word one day the people would rise in a body and destroy their oppressors.

The Emperor, the Ministers, the police, and the bureaucrats knew this, yet they were powerless—­they knew that the mysterious professor who had disappeared from Moscow fifteen years before and had never since been seen was only waiting his opportunity to strike a blow that would stagger and crush the Empire from end to end—­yet of his whereabouts they were in utter ignorance.

“You are surprised,” the old man laughed, noticing my amazement.  “Well, you are not one of us, yet I need not impress upon you the absolute necessity, for Mademoiselle’s sake, to preserve the secret of my existence.  It is because you are not a member of ’The Will of the People,’ that you have never heard of ’The Red Priest’—­red because I wrote my ultimatum to the Czar in the blood of one of his victims knouted in the fortress of Peter and Paul, and priest because I preach the gospel of freedom and justice.”

“I shall say nothing,” I said, gazing at the strangely striking figure before me—­the unknown man who directed the great upheaval that was to revolutionize Russia.  “My only desire is to save Mademoiselle Heath.”

“And you are prepared to do so at risk of your own liberty—­your own life?  Ah! you said you love her.  Would not this be a test of your affection?”