As Miss Haldin looked at her inquisitively she began to describe the emaciated face of the man, his fleshless limbs, his destitution.  The room into which the apple-woman had led her was a tiny garret, a miserable den under the roof of a sordid house.  The plaster fallen off the walls covered the floor, and when the door was opened a horrible tapestry of black cobwebs waved in the draught.  He had been liberated a few days before—­flung out of prison into the streets.  And Miss Haldin seemed to see for the first time, a name and a face upon the body of that suffering people whose hard fate had been the subject of so many conversations, between her and her brother, in the garden of their country house.

He had been arrested with scores and scores of other people in that affair of the lithographed temperance tracts.  Unluckily, having got hold of a great many suspected persons, the police thought they could extract from some of them other information relating to the revolutionist propaganda.

“They beat him so cruelly in the course of investigation,” went on the dame de compagnie, “that they injured him internally.  When they had done with him he was doomed.  He could do nothing for himself.  I beheld him lying on a wooden bedstead without any bedding, with his head on a bundle of dirty rags, lent to him out of charity by an old rag-picker, who happened to live in the basement of the house.  There he was, uncovered, burning with fever, and there was not even a jug in the room for the water to quench his thirst with.  There was nothing whatever—­just that bedstead and the bare floor.”

“Was there no one in all that great town amongst the liberals and revolutionaries, to extend a helping hand to a brother?” asked Miss Haldin indignantly.

“Yes.  But you do not know the most terrible part of that man’s misery.  Listen.  It seems that they ill-used him so atrociously that, at last, his firmness gave way, and he did let out some information.  Poor soul, the flesh is weak, you know.  What it was he did not tell me.  There was a crushed spirit in that mangled body.  Nothing I found to say could make him whole.  When they let him out, he crept into that hole, and bore his remorse stoically.  He would not go near anyone he knew.  I would have sought assistance for him, but, indeed, where could I have gone looking for it?  Where was I to look for anyone who had anything to spare or any power to help?  The people living round us were all starving and drunken.  They were the victims of the Ministry of Finances.  Don’t ask me how we lived.  I couldn’t tell you.  It was like a miracle of wretchedness.  I had nothing to sell, and I assure you my clothes were in such a state that it was impossible for me to go out in the daytime.  I was indecent.  I had to wait till it was dark before I ventured into the streets to beg for a crust of bread, or whatever I could get, to keep him and me alive.  Often I got nothing, and then I would crawl back and lie