As a matter of course, they were all introduced to Captain Ducie, but none of their names had been heard by him before—­indeed, he had a dim suspicion, gathered, he could not have told how, that the names by which they were made known to him were in some cases fictitious ones, and appropriated for that occasion only.  But to the Captain that fact mattered nothing.  They were people whom he should never meet after leaving Bon Repos, or if he did chance to meet them, whom he should never recognise.

One other noticeable feature there was about these birds of passage.  They were all men of considerable intelligence—­men who could talk tersely and well on almost any topic that might chance to come uppermost at table, or during the after-dinner smoke.  Literature, art, science, travel—­on any or all of these subjects they had opinions to offer; but one subject there was that seemed tabooed among them as by common consent:  that subject was politics.  Captain Ducie saw and recognised the fact, but as he himself was a man who cared nothing for politics of any kind, and would have voted them a bore in general conversation, he was by no means disposed to resent their extrusion from the table talk at Bon Repos.

As to whom and what these strangers might be, no direct information was vouchsafed by the Russian.  Captain Ducie was left in a great measure to draw his own conclusions.  A certain conversation which he had one day with his host seemed to throw some light on the matter.  Ducie had been asking Platzoff whether he did not sometimes regret having secluded himself so entirely from the world; whether he did not long sometimes to be in the great centres of humanity, in London or Paris, where alone life’s full flavour can be tasted.

“Whenever Bon Repos becomes Mal Repos,” answered Platzoff—­“whenever a longing such as you speak of comes over me—­and it does come sometimes—­then I flee away for a few weeks, to London oftener than anywhere else—­certainly not to Paris:  that to me is forbidden ground.  By-and-by I come back to my nest among the hills, vowing there is no place like it in the world’s wide round.  But even when I am here, I am not so shut out from the world and its great interests as you seem to imagine.  I see History enacting itself before my eyes, and I cannot sit by with averted face.  I hear the grand chant of Liberty as the beautiful goddess comes nearer and nearer and smites down one Oppressor after another with her red right hand; and I cannot shut my ears.  I have been an actor in the great drama of Revolution ever since a lad of twelve.  I saw my father borne off in chains to Siberia, and heard my mother with her dying breath curse the tyrant who had sent him there.  Since that day Conspiracy has been the very salt of my life.  For it I have fought and bled; for it I have suffered hunger, thirst, imprisonment, and dangers unnumbered.  Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg, are all places that I can never hope to see again.  For me to set foot in