Here the writing ended.  She folded the letter, and placed it in her desk, sitting down before it.

“Shall I make the check payable to you, or to the Society?”

“To the Society, if you please, Madam.”

“I shall write it for double the amount asked.  I also am a believer in liberty.”

“Oh, Madam, that is a generosity I feel we do not deserve.  I should like to have given you the letter after all you have done for us with no conditions attached.”

“I am quite sure of that,” said Dorothy, bending over her writing.  She handed him the check, and he rose to go.

“Sit down again, if you please.  I wish to talk further with you.  Your people in St. Petersburg think my friends have not been sent to Siberia?  Are they sure of that?”

“Well, Madam, they have means of knowing those who are transported, and they are certain the two young men were not among the recent gangs sent.  They suppose them to be in the fortress of ’St. Peter and St. Paul’, at least that’s what they say.”

“You speak as if you doubted it.”

“I do doubt it.”

“They have been sent to Siberia after all?”

“Ah, Madam, there are worse places than Siberia.  In Siberia there is a chance:  in the dreadful Trogzmondoff there is none.”

“What is the Trogzmondoff?”

“A bleak ‘Rock in the Baltic,’ Madam, the prison in which death is the only goal that releases the victim.”

Dorothy rose trembling, staring at him, her lips white.

“‘A Rock in the Baltic!’ Is that a prison, and not a fortress, then?”

“It is both prison and fortress, Madam.  If Russia ever takes the risk of arresting a foreigner, it is to the Trogzmondoff he is sent.  They drown the victims there; drown them in their cells.  There is a spring in the rock, and through the line of cells it runs like a beautiful rivulet, but the pulling of a lever outside stops the exit of the water, and drowns every prisoner within.  The bodies are placed one by one on a smooth, inclined shute of polished sandstone, down which this rivulet runs so they glide out into space, and drop two hundred feet into the Baltic Sea.  No matter in what condition such a body is found, or how recent may have been the execution, it is but a drowned man in the Baltic.  There are no marks of bullet or strangulation, and the currents bear them swiftly away from the rock.”

“How come you to know all this which seems to have been concealed from the rest of the world?”

“I know it, Madam, for the best of reasons.  I was sentenced this very year to Trogzmondoff.  In my youth trading between Helsingfors and New York, I took out naturalization papers in New York, because I was one of the crew on an American ship.  When they illegally impressed me at Helsingfors and forced me to join the Russian Navy, I made the best of a bad bargain, and being an expert seaman, was reasonably well treated, and promoted, but at last they discovered I was in correspondence with a Nihilist circle in London, and when I was arrested, I demanded the rights of an American citizen.  That doomed me.  I was sent, without trial, to the Trogzmondoff in April of this year.  Arriving there I was foolish enough to threaten, and say my comrades had means of letting the United States Government know, and that a battleship would teach the gaolers of the rock better manners.