Near Stevens's lodgings was an empty house of which he had the key, and in which he had already met representatives of that terrible class of men who are now found in all parts of the civilised world, but most where the double eagle of the Russian flag proclaims the despotic rule of St. Petersburg--the Nihilists. Revolving in his mind various plans for getting rid of Larkin without actually committing murder, he determined, on the spur of the moment, to lock him up over night at this secret place of rendezvous. He even thought vaguely of blowing up the building with a bomb, which one of his friends would supply on demand. He shrank, however, from this extreme measure, which would put his own head in peril, and contented himself with giving the war correspondent a good scare, out of pure malice, and with so disposing of his person that he would be kept out of the way over night. He had no doubt that Larkin would gain his release in some way the next morning, but there would be time, meanwhile, to don a new disguise and perfect arrangements for leaving the city. How he failed, we have seen. Fred Larkin was not an easy man to scare, or to keep within four walls against his will. The next morning, accordingly, both spy and reporter were at the railway station, eager to take the first train for the north. There was a dense crowd of refugees struggling for places, and neither of the two men was conscious of the other's presence on board when the guard's whistle sounded at last, and the long train--the last train for many a weary month, as it proved--moved out of Port Arthur. It was six o'clock on the morning of May 6th. The sun had burst through the clouds which had rendered the preceding night so gloomy, and the country around the city stretched out on either side of the railroad in all the loveliness of spring. Fields and hillsides flushed with blossoms of almond and apricot, and opened fair reaches of greensward as the train rolled past. In sheltered nooks, by the banks of dancing streamlets, nestled those little Chinese villages which, however squalid upon close acquaintance, add a picturesque touch to the Oriental landscape. All around the horizon was piled with high hills, clothed in verdure or reddish in the early sunlight where broad ledges and stretches of sandy slope had been denuded by storm and the hand of man. Larkin almost forgot the war and the hot passions that were smouldering behind the fair peaks and along the hidden valleys of Manchuria, as he gazed from the car window and thought of the Brookfield meadows in May, the little stream where he had caught his first trout, and the pine wood which sheltered the brave mayflowers and hepaticas before the winter's drifts had melted on the northern slopes and in the deeper recesses of the forest.