Part 25 (2/2)
She was drawn insensibly toward the man who had awakened this instinct within her and ministered to it whenever he approached her.
They drank their tea in silence, each perhaps afraid to admit the hazard of their task. When the moment came, she had recovered her self-control sufficiently to refer again to the question of the cheque and to do so adroitly.
”Are you going to return that money to my father, w.i.l.l.y?”
”That's just as you like. When you come here for good, we could send it back together.”
”What makes you think that I will come here for good, w.i.l.l.y?”
”Because when I kiss you--like this--you tremble, Anna.”
He caught her instantly in his arms and covered her face with pa.s.sionate kisses. Struggling for a moment in his embrace, she lay there presently acquiescent as he had known even before his hands touched her. An hour had pa.s.sed before Anna quitted the flat--and then she knew beyond any possibility of question that she was about to become w.i.l.l.y Forrest's wife.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE PRISON YARD
The great gates of the prison yard rolled back to admit the carriage in which Alban had been driven from the hotel, and a cordon of straight-backed officials immediately surrounded it. Early as the hour was, the meanest servant whom Zaniloff commanded had work to do and well understood the urgency of his task. The night had been one long story of plot and counterplot; of Revolutionaries fleeing from street to street, Cossacks galloping upon their heels, houses awakened and doors beaten down, the screams and cries of women, the savage anger of men. And all this, not upon the famous avenues which knew little of the new emeute, but down in the narrow alleys of the old city where bulging gables hid the sight from a clear heaven of stars and the crazy eaves had husbanded the cries.
There had been a civil battle fought and many were the prisoners. Not a cell about that great yard but had not its batch of ragged, s.h.i.+vering wretches whose backs were still b.l.o.o.d.y, whose wounds were still unbound.
The quadrangle itself served, as a Cossack jocularly remarked, for the overflow meeting. Here you might perceive many types of men-students, still defiant, sage lawyers given to the parley, ragged vermin of the slums gathering their rags close about their shoulders as though to protect them from the lash; timid apostles of the gospel of humanity cowering before human fiends--thus the yard and its environment. For Alban, however, the place might not have existed. His eyes knew nothing of this grim spectacle. He followed the Chief to the upper rooms, remembering only that Lois was here.
They pa.s.sed down a gloomy corridor and entered a lofty room high up on the third floor of the station. Two s.p.a.cious windows gave them a fine view of the yard below with all its gregarious misery. There was a table here covered by a green baize cloth, and an officer in uniform writing at it. He stood and saluted Zaniloff with a gravity fine to see. The Chief, in turn, nodded to him and drew a chair to the table. When he had found ink and paper he began the interrogation which should help his dossier.
”You are an Englishman and your age is”--he waited and turned to Alban.
”My age is just about twenty-one.”
”You were born in England?”
”In London; I was born in London.”
”And you now live?”
”With Mr. Richard Gessner at Hampstead.”
So it went--interminable question and answer, of the most trivial kind.
It seemed an age before they came to the vital issue.
”And what do you know of this crime which has been committed?”
”I know nothing--how could I know anything.”
”Pardon me, you were yesterday in company of the girl who is charged with its commission.”
”The charge is absurd--I am sure of it.”
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