“Have you told your mother?” I ventured to ask.

“No.  Not yet.  I came out to walk off the impression of this letter.”

I heard a rustle of paper somewhere.  It came from her muff.  She had the letter with her in there.

“What is it that you are afraid of?” I asked.

To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of political plots and conspiracies seem childish, crude inventions for the theatre or a novel.  I did not like to be more definite in my inquiry.

“For us—­for my mother specially, what I am afraid of is incertitude.  People do disappear.  Yes, they do disappear.  I leave you to imagine what it is—­the cruelty of the dumb weeks—­months—­years!  This friend of ours has abandoned his inquiries when he heard of the police getting hold of the letters.  I suppose he was afraid of compromising himself.  He has a wife and children—­and why should he, after all....  Moreover, he is without influential connections and not rich.  What could he do?...  Yes, I am afraid of silence—­for my poor mother.  She won’t be able to bear it.  For my brother I am afraid of...” she became almost indistinct, “of anything.”

We were now near the gate opposite the theatre.  She raised her voice.

“But lost people do turn up even in Russia.  Do you know what my last hope is?  Perhaps the next thing we know, we shall see him walking into our rooms.”

I raised my hat and she passed out of the gardens, graceful and strong, after a slight movement of the head to me, her hands in the muff, crumpling the cruel Petersburg letter.

On returning home I opened the newspaper I receive from London, and glancing down the correspondence from Russia—­not the telegrams but the correspondence—­the first thing that caught my eye was the name of Haldin.  Mr. de P—–­’s death was no longer an actuality, but the enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some unofficial information about that fact of modern history.  He had got hold of Haldin’s name, and had picked up the story of the midnight arrest in the street.  But the sensation from a journalistic point of view was already well in the past.  He did not allot to it more than twenty lines out of a full column.  It was quite enough to give me a sleepless night.  I perceived that it would have been a sort of treason to let Miss Haldin come without preparation upon that journalistic discovery which would infallibly be reproduced on the morrow by French and Swiss newspapers.  I had a very bad time of it till the morning, wakeful with nervous worry and night-marish with the feeling of being mixed up with something theatrical and morbidly affected.  The incongruity of such a complication in those two women’s lives was sensible to me all night in the form of absolute anguish.  It seemed due to their refined simplicity that it should remain concealed from them for ever.  Arriving at an unconscionably early hour at the door of their apartment, I felt as if I were about to commit an act of vandalism....