During the two years that Vjera was kept in dungeons under a mere suspicion, she was twice only subjected to a secret inquiry--"judicial," if that is a word applicable to these dread Inquisition procedures. At last she feared she was forgotten. Nothing whatever having come out against her, she was finally set free, and went back to her heart-broken mother, only to be suddenly re-arrested ten days afterwards! For a moment, in spite of a two years' bitter experience, she childishly thought there was some mistake. But the horrible truth of her situation soon broke upon her. One morning she was seized in prison, and, without being allowed to take even a change of dress, or a mantle, transported by gendarmes to a distant province by way of banishment. One of these gendarmes threw his own fur over her shivering shoulders, or else she might have perished on the road. I will not go here through the whole "infernal circle" of her sufferings and involuntary migrations, which I have elsewhere described more fully. I will not relate how she was "moved on" from one place to the other; the only variety in her treatment consisting of an occasional return to prison. Eleven years had thus altogether elapsed when at last, in those vast dominions of the Czar, and amidst more thrilling events which began to crowd upon public attention, she seemed to be really forgotten. In this way she managed clandestinely to go back to the capital, whence again she started for Pensa. It was there that, by chance, she learnt from the _Novoje Vremja_ ("New Times,") the infamous treatment of Bogoljuboff, a political prisoner, by the chief of the police at St. Petersburg, the vile and universally despised Trepoff, the personal, intimate, and pampered darling of Alexander II. The flogging practices of this tyrannic head of the "Third Section" are still in every one's recollection. In referring to the knouting applied to Bogoljuboff, Vjera Sassulitch's counsel gave the following description:-- "The sufferer whose human dignity is to be insulted, knows not why he is to be punished. He thinks indignation will lend him strength to resist those who throw themselves upon him. But he is grasped by the iron grip of jailers' hands; he is dragged down; and in the midst of the regular counting of the strokes by the leader of the execution, a deep groan is heard--a groan not arising from mere physical pain, but from the soul's grief of a down-trodden, outraged man. At last, silence reigned again. The sacred act was accomplished!" It was the brooding over such disgrace and affront to which a political prisoner had been subjected in the very capital by an official whose department is under the Czar's direct control that pressed the weapon of revenge into the hands of a tender woman--not so much for her own past miseries as for those of a still suffering fellow-man.