to inform him about things, to explain themselves and things about them exhaustively.  One young student took him to various meetings and showed him in great detail the scene of the recent murder of the Grand Duke Sergius.  The buildings opposite the old French cannons were still under repair.  “The assassin stood just here.  The bomb fell there, look! right down there towards the gate; that was where they found his arm.  He was torn to fragments.  He was scraped up.  He was mixed with the horses. . . .”

Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter of days or at the utmost weeks.  And whatever question Benham chose to ask these talkers were prepared to answer.  Except one.  “And after the revolution,” he asked, “what then? . . .”  Then they waved their hands, and failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.

He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous drift towards a conflict.  He was trying to piece together a process, if it was one and the same process, which involved riots in Lodz, fighting at Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal battlings in Manchuria, the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in the Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was trying to rationalize it all in his mind, to comprehend its direction.  He was struggling strenuously with the obscurities of the language in which these things were being discussed about him, a most difficult language demanding new sets of visual images because of its strange alphabet.  Is it any wonder that for a time he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some entirely disconnected affair.

They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre Square.  Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-looking men with peacocks’ feathers round their caps, came Benham’s friends and guides to take him out and show him this and that.  At first Prothero always accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then he began to make excuses.  He would stay behind in the hotel.  Then when Benham returned Prothero would have disappeared.  When the porter was questioned about Prothero his nescience was profound.

One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who wanted to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was alarmed.

“Moscow is a late place,” said Benham’s student friend.  “You need not be anxious until after four or five in the morning.  It will be quite time—­quite time to be anxious to-morrow.  He may be—­close at hand.”

When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him sleepy and irritable.

“I don’t trouble if you are late,” said Prothero, sitting up in his bed with a red resentful face and crumpled hair.  “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow.”

“I don’t want to leave Moscow.”