of every house thus takes his station at the half-closed door at nightfall.  And it is so all through the town.  It is a Russian custom, imported among others into the free kingdom of Poland, when the great empire of the north cast the shadow of its protecting wing over the land that is watered by the Vistula.  So, no man may come or go in Warsaw without having his movements carefully noted by one who is directly responsible to the authorities for the good name of the house under his care.

“The poet is in.  There is a letter up-stairs,” said the door-keeper to Cartoner, as he passed in.  Cartoner’s servant was out, and the lamps were turned low when he entered his sitting-room.  He knew that the letter must be the reply to his application for a recall.  He turned up the lamp, and, taking the letter from the table where it lay in a prominent position, sat down in a deep chair to read it at leisure.

It bore no address, and prattled of the crops.  Some of it seemed to be nonsense.  Cartoner read it slowly and carefully.  It was an order, in brief and almost brutal language, to stay where he was and do the work intrusted to him.  For a man who writes in a code must perforce avoid verbosity.

XV

A TALE HALF TOLD

The heart soon accustoms itself to that existence which is called living upon a volcano.  Prince Bukaty had indeed known no other life, and to such as had daily intercourse with him he was quite a peaceful and jovial gentleman.  He had brought up his children in the same atmosphere of strife and peril, and it is to be presumed that the fit had survived, while the unfit princess, his wife, had turned her face to the wall quite soon, not daring to meet the years in which there could be no hope of alleviation.

The prince’s friends were not in Warsaw; many were at the mines.  Some lived in Paris; others were exiled to distant parts of Russia.  His generation was slowly passing away, and its history is one of the grimmest stories untold.  Yet he sat in that bare drawing-room of a poor man and read his Figaro quite placidly, like any bourgeois in the safety of the suburb, only glancing at the clock from time to time.

“He is late,” he said once, as he folded the paper, and that was all.

It was nearly eleven o’clock, and Martin had been expected to return to dinner at half-past six.  Wanda was working, and she, too, glanced towards the clock at intervals.  She was always uneasy about Martin, whose daring was rather of the reckless type, whose genius lay more in leadership than in strategy.  As to her father, he had come through the sixties, and had survived the persecution and the dangers of Wielopolski’s day—­he could reasonably be expected to take care of himself.  With regard to herself, she had no fear.  Hers was the woman’s lot of watching others in a danger which she could not share.

It was nearly half-past eleven when Martin came in.  He was in riding-costume and was covered with dirt.  His eyes, rimmed with dust, looked out of a face that was pale beneath the sunburn.  He threw himself into a chair with an exclamation of fatigue.