From Paris, after hours of indecision, he wired to Emily de Reuss at Molchavano.

“May I come to you?—­DOUGLAS.”

For a week he waited restlessly, a week of weary sightseeing and abortive attempts at holiday making.  No answer came.  On the eighth day he moved on to Vienna and sent another telegram.

“I am coming to you.—­DOUGLAS.”

Still no reply.  He waited for a day or two and then moved on to St. Petersburg.  Here he took up his quarters at the Hotel de l’Europe, and began to make inquiries about the journey across Siberia.  From here he sent another message out over the snowbound wastes.

“I leave for Molchavano in fourteen days.—­DOUGLAS.”

He made all the preparations for his journey, but on the twelfth day came word from her.

“I implore you not to come.  Return to London and await my letter.”  He travelled back, and those who saw him on his return remarked that the air of Devonshire had been without its usual benefit so far as he was concerned.  He shut himself up, wrote scarcely a line, waited only for his letter.  It came sooner than he had expected.  It contained more than he had dared to hope, less than he had prayed for.  This is what he read—­

“THE FORTRESS OF MOLCHAVANO,

“October 17th.

“So, Douglas, you have learnt the truth.  Well, I am glad of it.  You believe in me now?  You always may.  Looking back upon our last interview my only regret is that I did not tell you the whole truth then.

“It was foolish of me to withhold it—­foolish and inconsequent.  Yet I believe that if I had told you I should not have been here now.  So, after all, I have no regrets.

“I can hear you ask me then—­jealous as ever—­what is it that I have found here to reconcile me so easily to our separation, to an isolation which is indeed incredible and almost awful?  Douglas, it is that I have found good to do.  Everybody, you, I am afraid, included, has always looked upon me as a very selfish woman, and indeed I have been so most of the days of my life.  Never mind, my chance has come.  It was you who drove me here.  Thank you, Douglas.  Believe me that I shall bless you for it so long as I live.

“Would you care to know anything of my life, I wonder.  No?  For many reasons it were best not to tell you too much.  The fortress in which I live—­where the walls and floors are of stone, and without, the snow is deep upon the ground—­is only a few yards from the prison where my husband is kept.  I see him for five minutes every day through a window with iron bars—­yet he tells me that the thought of that five minutes keeps him alive hour by hour, and I am beginning to believe it.  For, Douglas, such monotony as this is a thing outside the imagination.  From the hilltop on which the prison is built I can see for twenty miles, and there is not a tree, nor a building, not even a rise or fall in the ground to break the awful and