with heavy, dark semicircles under them, as if she had spent many long, weary nights in weeping. It filled my heart with sympathy and pity merely to look at her. I had never seen so sad, hopeless, grief-stricken a face.
I spent half an hour with the Armfeldts and then left them, promising to return at a later hour in the evening, when Miss Armfeldt said she would have the other members of the free command there to meet me. Flushed with nervous excitement, I hurried back to Major Pótulof's house, where I found dinner waiting for me. Every now and then in the course of the meal Mrs. Pótulof would look at me with a curious expression in her face, as if she wondered what I had been doing all the afternoon; but apparently she could not summon up resolution enough to ask me, and it did not become necessary, therefore, for the recording angel to drop any more tears upon my already blotted record.
At seven o'clock I went back to the Armfeldts', where I found a political convict named Kurteíef, and a pale delicate young woman who was introduced to me as Madam Kolénkina. I recognized the latter by name as one of the revolutionists sent to the mines for alleged complicity in the plot to assassinate General Mézentsef, the St. Petersburg chief of police, but I was surprised to find her so young, delicate, and harmless-looking a woman. I had been surprised, however, in the same way many times before. The women who have taken an active part in some of the most terrible tragedies of the past fifteen years in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Odéssa, who have shown a power of endurance and a stern inflexibility of character rarely found in men, are delicate girls from eighteen to twenty-five years of age, whom I should have taken for teachers in a Sunday-school or rather timid pupils in a female seminary.
One by one the political convicts of the free command began to assemble at Miss Armfeldt's house. Every few minutes a low signal-knock would be heard at one of the
