And on this last word of her wisdom, a word so sweet, so bitter, so cruel sometimes, I said good-bye to Natalia Haldin.  It is hard to think I shall never look any more into the trustful eyes of that girl—­wedded to an invincible belief in the advent of loving concord springing like a heavenly flower from the soil of men’s earth, soaked in blood, torn by struggles, watered with tears.

It must be understood that at that time I didn’t know anything of Mr. Razumov’s confession to the assembled revolutionists.  Natalia Haldin might have guessed what was the “one thing more” which remained for him to do; but this my western eyes had failed to see.

Tekla, the ex-lady companion of Madame de S—­, haunted his bedside at the hospital.  We met once or twice at the door of that establishment, but on these occasions she was not communicative.  She gave me news of Mr. Razumov as concisely as possible.  He was making a slow recovery, but would remain a hopeless cripple all his life.  Personally, I never went near him:  I never saw him again, after the awful evening when I stood by, a watchful but ignored spectator of his scene with Miss Haldin.  He was in due course discharged from the hospital, and his “relative”—­so I was told—­had carried him off somewhere.

My information was completed nearly two years later.  The opportunity, certainly, was not of my seeking; it was quite accidentally that I met a much-trusted woman revolutionist at the house of a distinguished Russian gentleman of liberal convictions, who came to live in Geneva for a time.

He was a quite different sort of celebrity from Peter Ivanovitch—­a dark-haired man with kind eyes, high-shouldered, courteous, and with something hushed and circumspect in his manner.  He approached me, choosing the moment when there was no one near, followed by a grey-haired, alert lady in a crimson blouse.

“Our Sophia Antonovna wishes to be made known to you,” he addressed me, in his guarded voice.  “And so I leave you two to have a talk together.”

“I would never have intruded myself upon your notice,” the grey-haired lady began at once, “if I had not been charged with a message for you.”

It was a message of a few friendly words from Natalia Haldin.  Sophia Antonovna had just returned from a secret excursion into Russia, and had seen Miss Haldin.  She lived in a town “in the centre,” sharing her compassionate labours between the horrors of overcrowded jails, and the heartrending misery of bereaved homes.  She did not spare herself in good service, Sophia Antonovna assured me.

“She has a faithful soul, an undaunted spirit and an indefatigable body,” the woman revolutionist summed it all up, with a touch of enthusiasm.

A conversation thus engaged was not likely to drop from want of interest on my side.  We went to sit apart in a corner where no one interrupted us.  In the course of our talk about Miss Haldin, Sophia Antonovna remarked suddenly—­