"And a dangerous, and heart-breaking in its slowness, for lack of workers and for lack of funds. If you are ready to join me in the work I will be your wife." "I will join you, Hope Ivanovna, so long as you don't go to extremes. I am no believer in force as a remedy." "Nor I; brains and money properly applied will bring the remedy in time. It may be slow, but it will come. It must come. It shall come," she said vehemently; and added, with quiet conviction, "we want to build up, not to overthrow; to plant, not to uproot." "I am with you there with all my heart. We will work side by side in the matter." And doubtless in the glow of his passion he meant it. He had been prepared for some such demand. He had considered it. He was ready to accede to it sooner than lose her. Doubtless, also, somewhere in his mind there was the feeling that altruistic notions such as these were common to most women gifted with intelligence above the ordinary. And if one's heart were set upon such an one, why, you had to take the rough with the smooth, the thorn with the rose. It was a phase which time would overlay. The inducements of a safe, luxurious life would wean her from it by degrees, and there would be no harm done. But that only showed how very little he actually knew of the woman he had asked to be his wife. Her father was that Dr. Ivan Arskoi whose only crime was his far-sighted love for his fellows, and for the best interests of his country. To Autocracy and Bureaucracy, however, such a man represented social revolution. And so he did--but revolution by natural growth, not by fire and steel; evolution, therefore, though the results to the bureaucrats would be the same in the end. And, since those results must necessarily be extremely unpleasant, the bureaucrats promptly nipped Ivan Arskoi in the bud. He was labelled "untrustworthy." Administrative process carried him off one night to the Schlusselburg. For two years he lay there without trial, and there he died. His wife's heart broke against the bars, and Hope, a girl student of sixteen, was left alone in the world, except for an aunt who took charge of her, and old Marya Ostronaya, her nurse. Hope continued her studies and nourished the faith and hopes of her father. When the guardian aunt died, leaving her a tiny patrimony, she eked out her living by teaching, and devoted every spare minute of her life, and every rouble that could be saved from the slender housekeeping, to that quiet propaganda among the down-trodden for which her father had already given his life.