'Regard me as a sister,' she faltered: and in a moment more he was alone, with a confused sense of not having exhibited sufficient gratitude or regard for one who was risking so much for him. After she was gone the hours passed slowly, while Cecil remained sunk in thoughts that were far from being pleasant. Times there were when he felt sullenly and doggedly resigned to the inevitable, whatever it might be--to await what fate had in store for him. His essay in a new country, a new service and field, for laudable ambition, had proved a miserable and total failure, and life seemed to have no prize for him now that was worth consideration. Other times there were when a fierce gust of impatience and indignation possessed him, and he paced his room like a caged lion--impatience of coercion and just indignation at the severe treatment to which he was subjected, the unjust suspicion under which he lay, and the dangers which menaced him at the hands of the ignorant, prejudiced, and uninquiring officials at whose mercy he found himself. Thus he fell the more readily into Margarita's scheme of seeking safety in flight, and so ending all connection between himself and the Servian army. 'Death or Siberia--death or Siberia! What manner of death?' he would ask of himself; 'a soldier's, surely?' He felt sometimes, in his over-tension of thought, that peculiar emotion which many must have experienced--as though he was not himself, but had two separate identities; and that the old self was far away from that prison room, before the windows of which the two Russian sentinels seemed to tread for ever to and fro, with their bayonets glittering within arm's length of him. Were misfortune and he to go for ever hand in hand? He deemed that already he had offered up hostages, bitterly, to evil destiny, when he was thrust out of his beloved regiment, when he lost Mary, and was cast, nameless, on the world; and lo! the hand of fate was on him again, and more heavily than ever. And ever and anon a gust of rage at Guebhard shook his breast, with a longing for just vengeance upon him. Guebhard was evidently one of those strange and pernicious creatures who crop up at rare times in all phases of society, and have existed in all ages of mankind--one of a miserable band of men who, according to an essayist, resemble the lowest animals of creation, and are far more pitiless when their hate or hunger are raised. 'They are as crafty as they are cruel; they watch, wait, and see whom they can destroy, and outrage every feeling dear to the majority of mankind; and to call such men brutes is to throw scorn upon creatures who may be considered superior to them in every way.' Such a man was Mattei Guebhard!