I was very much shocked by this piece of ingenuity.

“Our three lives were like that!” Miss Haldin twined the fingers of both her hands together in demonstration, then separated them slowly, looking straight into my face.  “That’s what poor mother found to torment herself and me with, for all the years to come,” added the strange girl.  At that moment her indefinable charm was revealed to me in the conjunction of passion and stoicism.  I imagined what her life was likely to be by the side of Mrs. Haldin’s terrible immobility, inhabited by that fixed idea.  But my concern was reduced to silence by my ignorance of her modes of feeling.  Difference of nationality is a terrible obstacle for our complex Western natures.  But Miss Haldin probably was too simple to suspect my embarrassment.  She did not wait for me to say anything, but as if reading my thoughts on my face she went on courageously—­

“At first poor mother went numb, as our peasants say; then she began to think and she will go on now thinking and thinking in that unfortunate strain.  You see yourself how cruel that is....”

I never spoke with greater sincerity than when I agreed with her that it would be deplorable in the highest degree.  She took an anxious breath.

“But all these strange details in the English paper,” she exclaimed suddenly.  “What is the meaning of them?  I suppose they are true?  But is it not terrible that my poor brother should be caught wandering alone, as if in despair, about the streets at night....”

We stood so close to each other in the dark anteroom that I could see her biting her lower lip to suppress a dry sob.  After a short pause she said—­

“I suggested to mother that he may have been betrayed by some false friend or simply by some cowardly creature.  It may be easier for her to believe that.”

I understood now the poor woman’s whispered allusion to Judas.

“It may be easier,” I admitted, admiring inwardly the directness and the subtlety of the girl’s outlook.  She was dealing with life as it was made for her by the political conditions of her country.  She faced cruel realities, not morbid imaginings of her own making.  I could not defend myself from a certain feeling of respect when she added simply—­

“Time they say can soften every sort of bitterness.  But I cannot believe that it has any power over remorse.  It is better that mother should think some person guilty of Victor’s death, than that she should connect it with a weakness of her son or a shortcoming of her own.”

“But you, yourself, don’t suppose that....”  I began.