“To Russia?” broke from Winton Edwards.

“To Russia, yes!” The girl’s pale cheeks glowed. “You have seen my father, what he is, what they have made of him, and you did not know he was a Russian? You have seen him as he is! Let me tell you—you, who wear proudly the badge of your revolution fought in seven short years by your great-grandfathers—what my father was!

“Before I was born—it was in the year 1887—my father was a student in Moscow. He had married my mother the year before. The czar, finding that even the teachings he had been advised to permit made people dangerous, closed the universities. Father and his fellow students protested. They were imprisoned; and they kept my father, who had led the protest, so long that I was three years old before he saw his home again!

“But suffering and prison could not frighten him! In Zurich, before he went to Moscow, he had been trained for a doctor. And seeing how powerless the protest of the students had been, he determined to go among the people. So he made himself a medical missionary to the poorest, the most oppressed, the most miserable; and wherever he was called to carry a cure for disease, he carried, too, a word of hope, of courage, of protest, a cry for freedom!

“Late one night, in a terrible snowstorm,” she went on, “just twenty years ago, a peasant brought to our door a note, unsigned for the sake of safety, it seemed, telling father that an escaped political prisoner was dying of exposure and starvation in a hut on a deserted farm ten miles from the town. My father hurried to his horse and set out, with food and fagots, and by morning, through the cold and deep snow, he reached the place.

“There he found a man apparently freezing to death, and fed and warmed him,” said the girl; “and when the fellow was able to tell his pitiful tale, father boldly encouraged him, told him of the organization of protest he was forming, and asked him to join. Little by little father told him all he had done and all his plans. At nightfall father said farewell and turned to the door, where he found himself facing a spy, who held a pistol at his head. In the fight that followed, father was able only to wound the other upon the chest with the blunt knife they had used to cut their food, before the spy called a second confederate down from the loft, and father was overcome.

“On the information of these police spies, without trial of any sort—father’s friends could discover only that the name of his betrayer was Valerian Urth—father was sentenced to solitary 

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