Paul raised his head and looked round.  In the dim light of the two smoky lamps he saw a ring of wild faces.  Men with shaggy beards and hair all entangled and unkempt, with fierce eyes and lowering glances; women with faces that unsexed them.  There were despair and desperation and utter recklessness in the air, in the attitude, in the hearts of these people.  And Paul had worked among them for years.  The sight would have been heart-breaking had Paul Howard Alexis been the sort of man to admit the possibility of a broken heart.  All that he had done had been frustrated by the wall of heartless bureaucracy against which he had pitched his single strength.  There was no visible progress.  These were not the faces of men and women moving up the social scale by the aid of education and the deeper self-respect that follows it.  Some of them were young, although they hardly looked it.  They were young in years, but old in life and misery.  Some of them he knew to be educated.  He had paid for the education himself.  He had risked his own personal freedom to procure it for them, and misery had killed the seed.

He looked on this stony ground, and his stout heart was torn with pity.  It is easy to be patient in social economy when that vague jumble of impossible ideas is calmly discussed across the dinner-table.  But the result seems hopelessly distant when the mass of the poor and wretched stand before one in the flesh.

Paul knew that this little room was only a specimen of the whole of Russia.  Each of these poor peasants represented a million—­equally hopeless, equally powerless to contend with an impossible taxation.

He could not give them money, because the tax-collector had them all under his thumb and would exact the last kopeck.  The question was far above his single-handed reach, and he did not dare to meet it openly and seek the assistance of the few fellow-nobles who faced the position without fear.

He could not see in the brutal faces before him one spark of intelligence, one little gleam of independence and self-respect which could be attributed to his endeavor; which the most sanguine construction could take as resulting from his time and money given to a hopeless cause.

“Well,” he said.  “Have you nothing to tell me of your prince?”

“You know him,” answered the man who had spoken from the safe background.  “We need not tell you.”

“Yes,” answered Paul; “I know him.”

He would not defend himself.

“There,” he went on, addressing the man whose hand was now bandaged.  “You will do.  Keep clean and sober, and it will heal.  Get drunk and go dirty, and you will die.  Do you understand, Ivan Ivanovitch?”

The man grunted sullenly, and moved away to give place to a woman with a baby in her arms.

Paul glanced into her face.  He had known her a few years earlier a happy child playing at her mother’s cottage door.