"And I know yours also," Godfrey replied. "Now that you speak I know you. You are the young Englishman, Godfrey Bullen." "I am," Godfrey replied; "and you?" "Alexis Stumpoff." "So it is!" Godfrey exclaimed in surprise, and, delighted at this meeting, they shook hands cordially. "But what are you here for?" Godfrey asked. "I thought that you had obtained an appointment at Tobolsk." "Yes, I was sent out as assistant to the doctor of one of the prisons. I suppose you understood that it was not the sort of appointment one would choose." "I was certainly surprised when I heard that you were going so far away," Godfrey said, "as my friends told me that you had property. It seemed almost like going into banishment." "That was just what it was," the young doctor laughed. "I had been too outspoken in my political opinions, and one or two of our set had been arrested and sent out here; and when I was informed, on the day after I passed my examinations, that I was appointed to a prison at Tobolsk, it was also intimated to me that it would be more agreeable to go there in that capacity than as a prisoner. As I was also of that opinion, and as, to tell you the truth, some of our friends were for pushing matters a good deal farther than I cared about doing, I was not altogether sorry to get out of it." "But how is it that you are here as a prisoner?" Godfrey asked. "That is more than I can tell you. Some two months ago the governor of the prison entered my room with two warders, and informed me briefly that I was to be sent here as a prisoner. I had ten minutes given me to pack up my things for the journey, and half an hour later was in the cabin of a steamer, with a Cossack at the door. What it was for, Heaven only knows. I had never broken any regulations, never spoken to a political prisoner when in the hospital except to ask him medical questions, and had never opened my lips on politics to a soul there." "I think perhaps I can enlighten you," Godfrey said; and he related to him the attempt to blow up the emperor at the Winter Palace, and the fate of Petroff Stepanoff and Akim Soushiloff. "That does indeed explain it," Alexis said. "I was very intimate with both of them, and it is quite enough to have been intimate with two men engaged in a plot against the life of the Czar to ensure one a visit to Siberia. So that is it! I have thought of everything, and it seemed to me that it must have been something at St. Petersburg--that my name had been found on a list when some of the Nihilists were arrested, or something of that sort; for I certainly did join them, but that was before there was any idea of taking steps against the Czar. No wonder you are here, after being mixed up in that escape of Valerian Ossinsky, and then being caught again with four Nihilists just after that terrible attempt to blow up the Czar. I wonder they did not hang you."