last Thursday, when he came to the office, I never saw him. But he has come to call me for the cause which must be to me higher and holier than love. I must leave my love for the cause of Russia. I must go and nurse our soldiers on the battlefield. I have been promised a full pardon if I will do so.”

Meyan now, with a heavy slouch of his muscular body, left his two companions at the table and moved up beside the girl. “Have any more of you anything to say to her before she goes back with me to Russia?”

“To her? No,” Trant replied. “But to you—and to these gentlemen”—he motioned to the two who had sat at the table with Meyan—“I have to announce the result of my test, for which they are waiting. This elder gentleman is Ivan Munikov, who was forced to leave Russia eight years ago because his pamphlet on ‘Inalienable Rights’ had incurred the displeasure of the police. This younger man is Dmitri Vasili, who was exiled to Siberia for political offenses at thirteen years of age, but escaped to America. They both are members of the Russian revolutionary organization in Chicago.”

“But the test—the test!” cried Vasili. “The test”—the psychologist turned sternly to face Meyan—“has shown as conclusively and irrefutably as I could hope that this man is not the revolutionist he claims to be, but is, as we suspected might be the case, an agent of the Russian secret police. And not only that! It has shown just as truly, though this fact was at first wholly unsuspected by me, that he—this agent of police who would have betrayed the daughter now and taken her back to Russia to be punished for her share in the previous agitation—is the same agent who, twenty years ago, betrayed the father, Herman Silber, into imprisonment! True name from false I do not know; but this man, who calls himself Meyan now, called himself then Valerian Urth!”

“Valerian Urth!” Eva Silber cried, staggering back into Winton Edwards’ arms.

But Meyan made a disdainful gesture with his huge, fat hands. “Bah! You would try to prove such things by your foolish test?”

“Then you will not refuse, of course,” Trant demanded sternly, “to show us if there is a knife scar on your chest?”

Even as Meyan would have repeated his denial, Vasili and Munikov leaped from the rear of the room and tore his shirt from his breast. The psychologist rubbed and beat the skin, and the blood rose to the surface, revealing the thin line of an almost invisible and time-effaced scar.

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