He had stolen Paul Boriskoff's secret from him and thereby had made a fortune. Let it be admitted that the first conception of the new furnace for the refining of copper had come from that white-faced whimpering miner, who could talk of nothing but his nation's wrongs and had no finer ambition in life than to feed his children. He, Richard Gessner, had done what such a fellow never could have done. He had made the furnace commercially possible and had exploited it through the copper mines of the world. Such had been the first rung of that magnificent pecuniary ladder he had afterwards climbed so adroitly. Money he had amassed beneath his grasping hand as at a magician's touch. He regretted, he had always regretted, that misfortune overtook Paul Boriskoff's family--he would have helped them had he been in Poland at the time; but their offences were adjudged to be political; and if the wretched woman suffered harm at the hands of the police, what share had he in it? To this point he charged himself lightly--as men will in justifying themselves before the finger of an hoary accusation. Gessner cared neither for God nor man. His only daughter had been at once his divinity and his religion. Let men call him a rogue, despot, or thief, and he would shrug his shoulders and glance aside at his profit and loss account. But let them call him "fool" and the end of his days surely was at hand. And so this self-examination to-night troubled itself with no thought of wrongs committed, with no desire to repay, but only with that supreme act of folly, to which the sleeping lad in the room near by was the surest witness. What would the threats of such a pauper as Paul Boriskoff have mattered if the man had stood alone against him? A word to the police, a hundred pounds to a score of ruffians, and he would have been troubled no more. But his quarrel was not with a man but a nation. Perceiving that the friendship of the Russian Government was necessary to many of his mining schemes in the East, he had changed his name as lightly as another would have changed his coat, had cast the garments of a sham patriotism and emerged an enemy to all that he had hitherto befriended, a foe to Poland, a servant to Russia. Acting secretly and with a strong man's discretion, no bruit of this odd conversion had been made public, no whisper of it heard in the camp of the Revolutionaries. Many knew Maxim Gogol--none had heard of Richard Gessner. His desire for secrecy was in good accord with the plans of a police he assisted and the bureaucracy he bribed. He lived for a while in Vienna, then at Tiflis--he came at length to England where his daughter had been educated; and there he established himself, ostensibly as a wealthy banker, in reality as the secret director of one of the greatest conspiracies against the liberty of a little nation that the world had ever seen.