“Love?” she whispered, her face paling.  “How do you dare to—?”

“Dare?  Because my heart bids me.  And where it bids, I care not for conventions or consequences!” He flung his hand out with a splendid gesture, his head high, his eyes lustrous in the half-light of the cell.  “Where it leads, I have to follow.  That is why I am a Socialist!  That is why I am here, today, outcast and execrated, a prisoner, in danger of long years of living death in the pestilential tomb of some foul penitentiary!”

“You’re here because—­because you are a Socialist?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Yes,” said he.  “I tried to help a suffering, outcast woman—­or one who posed as such.  And she betrayed me to my enemies.  And so—­”

“There was a woman in this affair, then?” Catherine queried with sudden pain.  “The newspapers haven’t made the story all up out of whole cloth?”

“No.  There was a woman.  A Delilah, who delivered me into the hands of the Philistines, when I tried to help her in what she lied in telling me was her need.  Will you hear the story?”

Still very pale, she formed a half-inarticulate “Yes!” with her full lips.  Then, seeming to brace herself by a tighter clasp on the hard steel grating, she listened while he spoke.

Earnestly, honestly and with perfect straightforwardness, omitting nothing, adding nothing, he gave her the narrative of that fatal night’s events, from the first moment he had laid eyes on the wonderfully-disguised woman, till her cudgel-blow had laid him senseless on the floor.

He told her the part that every actor therein had played; how the whole drama had been staged, to dishonor and convict him, to railroad him to the Pen for a long term, perhaps to kill him.  He spoke in a low voice, to prevent the watching officer from overhearing; and as he talked, he thanked his stars that in all this network of conspiracy and crime against the Party and against himself, his captors had not yet placed him incommunicado.  For some reason—­perhaps because they thought their case against him absolutely secure and wanted to avoid any appearance of unfairness or of martyrizing him—­this restriction had not yet been laid upon him.  So now his message of the truth could reach the ears of her who, more than all the world beside, had grown dear to him and precious beyond words.

He told her, then, not only the story of that night, but also all that had since happened—­the newspaper attacks on him and on the Party; the deliberate attempt to poison the community and the nation against him; the struggle to fix a foul and lasting blot upon his name, and ruin him beyond redemption.

“And why, all this?” he added, while she—­listening so intently that she hardly breathed—­knew that he spoke the living, vital truth.  “Why this persecution, this plotting, this labor and expense to ‘get’ me.  Do you want to know?”