The shock of these words brought the girl to her feet with a spring. "Your brother? Your brother?" she cried, incoherently. "Oh, no, for his brother was hard and merciless, and you--you are always so good and generous! That can't be true--it simply can't!" The Squire, too, rose. "Let me tell you something of our early life," he said, with urgency. "You have told me the truth--the truth which I ought to have heard when first you came to us. If I had known--but I do my brother justice. He did not wish me to know that it was he until he had had a chance to show that he meant to try and do better. He has done better. He has apparently put in two years of good, steady work, and conquered a position for himself. But his discreditable past still drags at his heels. What did he tell you of his past, if I may ask the question?" She answered, softly and low, "He told me that he had been in prison. But he said he was very sorry. He was misled, enticed, by bad men, who were too clever for him. He was young, and his head was full of great ideas." "Let us walk along, away from the others," said Denzil, "and I will try and tell you something about Felix's mother." CHAPTER XVI HAPPENINGS IN A STRANGE LAND --I ventured to remind her, I suppose with a voice of less steadiness Than usual, for my feeling exceeded me, --Something to the effect that I was in readiness Whenever God should please she needed me. --ROBERT BROWNING. To the English imagination, Siberia is mainly a land of cold and darkness, through which gangs of despairing convicts are driven with the lashings of governmental whips. But its beauties and its resources are being by degrees revealed through that wonderful agency for the uniting of the isolated and the rejoining of the divided, which we call the railway. The province of Barralinsk is one of the most beautiful, lying, as it does, not far east of the Ural Mountains and being well wooded in its southern part. To reach the Savlinsky Copper Mines one must leave the Trans-Siberian railway at Gretz and drive for five hundred miles in a northwesterly direction. The last three hundred miles of the journey are, for the most part, across a treeless, rolling steppe, like some heaving sea transformed into dry land without losing its rise and fall. But Savlinsky itself lies not more than ten miles from a beautifully wooded district, known as Nicolashof, where the present Governor of the province, Stepan Nikitsch, or as he was usually called, Stepan Stepanovitch, had built himself, not far from a woodland village, a summer residence, in which he was accustomed to pass the hot weather, his solitude being shared by his only and motherless daughter, Nadia Stepanovna.