The ardour of his proselytising made him leave Paris at the end of five years.  He was anxious to see the world, to study for himself all these social miseries, so as to judge what forces these disinherited could command for their great transformation.  Besides, he began to find himself incommoded by the vigilance of the French police, on account of his intimacy with the Russian students of the Quartier Latin—­young men with cold eyes and limp and dishevelled hair who were endeavouring to implant in Paris the vengeances of Nihilism.  In London he came to know a young Englishwoman of weak health, but burning like himself with all the ardour of revolutionary propaganda, who would walk from morning till night in the lanes and surroundings of workshops and laboratories, distributing pamphlets and printed leaflets that she kept in a band-box that was always hanging on her arm.  In a short time Lucy became Gabriel’s companion; they loved each other without excitement, with a cold and quiet passion, more from community of ideas than anything else, for the love of revolutionists, dominated with the thought of rebellion against everything existing, has not much room for any other feeling.

Luna and his companion went to Holland and thence to Belgium, settling afterwards in Germany, always travelling from group to group of “companions,” taking up different work with that facility of adaptation which seems universal among revolutionaries, who wander over the world penniless, enduring every sort of privation, but finding always in their difficulties some brotherly hand to raise them and set them again on the path.

After eight years of this life Gabriel’s friend died of consumption.  They were then in Italy, and Luna, finding himself alone, understood for the first time how much support the gentle companion of his life had given him.  In his sorrow for the loss of Lucy he forgot for a while his revolutionary enthusiasm, lamenting only the void left in his life.  He had not loved her as most men love, but she was his companion, his sister, they were alike in their pleasures and their sorrows, and their common poverty had welded them into one will.  Moreover, Gabriel felt himself aged before his time by this life of soul-stirring adventures and painful privations.  He had been imprisoned in many places in Europe, being suspected of complicity with the terrorists, he had often been beaten by the police, and he began to find a difficulty in travelling about the Continent, as his photograph figured with that of several other “companions” in the central police offices of the principal nations.  He was a vagabond and dangerous dog, who would end by being kicked out of every place.