me.  I met a similar repulse at the Admiralty.  I dined alone at the restaurant Jack and I frequent, but saw nothing of him.  This morning he has not returned, and I am at my wit’s end, not in the least knowing what to do.  It is useless for me to appeal to the embassy of my country, for, Jack being a Russian, it has no jurisdiction.  The last letter I received from you was tampered with.  The newspaper extract you spoke of was not there, and one of the sheets of the letter was missing.  Piffling business, I call it, this interfering with private correspondence.

Such was the last letter that Alan Drummond was ever to send to Dorothy Amhurst.

CHAPTER XI

 The snow

Summer waned; the evenings became chill, although the sun pretended at noon that its power was undiminished.  Back to town from mountain and sea shore filtered the warm-weather idlers, but no more letters came from St. Petersburg to the hill by the Hudson.  So far as our girls were concerned, a curtain of silence had fallen between Europe and America.

The flat was now furnished, and the beginning of autumn saw it occupied by the two friends.  Realization in this instance lacked the delight of anticipation.  At last Katherine was the bachelor girl she had longed to be, but the pleasures of freedom were as Dead Sea fruit to the lips.  At last Dorothy was effectually cut off from all thoughts of slavery, with unlimited money to do what she pleased with, yet after all, of what advantage was it in solving the problem that haunted her by day and filled her dreams by night.  She faced the world with seeming unconcern, for she had not the right to mourn, even if she knew he were dead.  He had made no claim; had asked for no affection; had written no word to her but what all the world might read.  Once a week she made a little journey up the Hudson to see how her church was coming on, and at first Katherine accompanied her, but now she went alone.  Katherine was too honest a girl to pretend an interest where she felt none.  She could not talk of architecture when she was thinking of a man and his fate.  At first she had been querulously impatient when no second communication came.  Her own letters, she said, must have reached him, otherwise they would have been returned.  Later, dumb fear took possession of her, and she grew silent, plunged with renewed energy into her books, joined a technical school, took lessons, and grew paler and paler until her teachers warned her she was overdoing it.  Inwardly she resented the serene impassiveness of her friend, who consulted calmly with the architect upon occasion about the decoration of the church, when men’s liberty was gone, and perhaps their lives.  She built up within her mind a romance of devotion, by which her lover, warning in vain the stolid Englishman, had at last been involved in the ruin that Drummond’s stubbornness had brought upon them both, and unjustly implicated the quiet woman by her side in the responsibility of this sacrifice.  Once or twice she spoke with angry impatience of Drummond and his stupidity, but Dorothy neither defended nor excused, and so no open rupture occurred between the two friends, for a quarrel cannot be one-sided.