Count Zamoyski Sleeps

He closed the curtains, thankful that the Cossacks stood sentinels without, and hungering for sleep which had been denied to him so often lately. If he had any consolation of his thoughts, it lay in the comparative secrecy of his present mission and the fact that to-day would accomplish its purpose. The girl Lois had not confessed Richard Gessner's secret and she would stand presently where confession would not help her. As for this agreeable youth, who certainly had been her lover, he must be coerced into silence, threatened, cajoled, bought. Sergius remembered Alban's fine gospel of life and laughed when he recalled it. This devotion to humanity, this belief in great causes, what was it worth when a woman laughed and her rosy lips parted for a kiss? The world is too busy for the pedants who would stem the social revolution, was his argument--the rich men have too much to do to hide their common frailties that they should put on the habits of the friars. Let this hot gospeller acquire a fortune and he would become as the others before a month had passed. The women would see to that--for were not two of them already about the business?

He closed his curtains and undressed with a clumsy hand upon the buttons and many a curse at the obstinate things. The intense silence of the morning hour depressed him and he wondered that the hotel should sleep so soundly. His own door was both locked and bolted--he had a pistol in his travelling-bag and would finger it with grim satisfaction at such moments as these. Hitherto he had owed much to his very bravado, to a habit of going in and out among the people freely, and deriding all politics as a fool's employment. Latterly he had been wondering how far this habit would protect him, had made shrewd guesses at the truth and had come to the stage of question. Yesterday's work helped him to confirm these vague suspicions. How came it that Lois Boriskoff was able to warn this young Englishman, why had she come immediately to his hotel and followed him to the old quarters of the city? This could only mean that her friends had telegraphed the information from London, that every step of the journey had been reported and that a promising plan of action had been decided upon. Sergius dreaded this more than anything that could have happened to him. They will ask what share I had in it, he told himself; and he knew what the answer to that must be. Let them but suspect a hundredth part of the truth and he might not have twenty hours to live.