Chapter 11 - Page 2

of her fingers on the sill seemed to drum a Dead March of despair. The falling snow had darkened the room, and one electric light was aglow over the dainty Chippendale desk at which Dorothy sat writing a letter. The smooth, regular flow of the pen over the paper roused Katherine to a frenzy of exasperation. Suddenly she brought her clenched fist down on the sill where her fingers had been drumming.

"My God," she cried, "how can you sit there like an automaton with the snow falling?"

Dorothy put down her pen.

"The snow falling?" she echoed. "I don't understand!"

"Of course you don't. You don't think of the drifts in Siberia, and the two men you have known, whose hands you have clasped, manacled, driven through it with the lash of a Cossack's whip."

Dorothy rose quietly, and put her hands on the shoulders of the girl, feeling her frame tremble underneath her touch.

"Katherine," she said, quietly, but Katherine, with a nervous twitch of her shoulders flung off the friendly grasp.

"Don't touch me," she cried. "Go back to your letter-writing. You and the Englishman are exactly alike; unfeeling, heartless. He with his selfish stubbornness has involved an innocent man in the calamity his own stupidity has brought about."

"Katherine, sit down. I want to talk calmly with you."

"Calmly! Calmly! Yes, that is the word. It is easy for you to be calm when you don't care. But I care, and I cannot be calm."

"What do you wish to do, Katherine?"

"What can I do? I am a pauper and a dependent, but one thing I am determined to do, and that is to go and live in my father's house."

"If you were in my place, what would you do Katherine?"

"I would go to Russia."

"What would you do when you arrived there?"

"If I had wealth I would use it in such a campaign of bribery and corruption in that country of tyrants that I should release two innocent men. I'd first find out where they were, then I'd use all the influence I possessed with the American Ambassador to get them set free."

"The American Ambassador, Kate, cannot move to release either an Englishman or a Russian."

"I'd do it somehow. I wouldn't sit here like a stick or a stone, writing letters to my architect."

"Would you go to Russia alone?"

"No, I should take my father with me."

"That is an excellent idea, Kate. I advise you to go north by to-night's train, if you like, and see him, or telegraph to him to come and see us."

Kate sat down, and Dorothy drew the curtains across the window pane and snapped on the central cluster of electric lamps.

"Will you come with me if I