Wandering about from room to room, stopping here and there to say “Kharasho!” or “Nichevo!” to some poor girl dissolved in tears upon a bench, I came out finally in a corridor where Mr. Williams was standing with his interpreter. A cadet officer had hold of the lapels of his overcoat, and was pleading with him to take it off and let him escape. The boy’s bronze face was gray with fear, and his words tumbled over each other in jumbled incoherence. I glanced from him to the American, and saw a pair of eyes full of pain and indecision. A tense, silent moment followed--a moment in which I held my breath and waited. The shooting outside had stopped. Dark was closing in around us. Everything for me was obliterated but the one man asking for something that might save his life, and the other to whom it was second nature to give, torn between conviction and desire. I knew the tumult in his soul. The coat of rough brown cloth and American cut was strikingly different from any other in Russia, and it had become a familiar garment in revolutionary Petrograd. Its owner was an excellent speaker, and he had talked to the men at the front, on the fleet, and in the factories, and wrapped in the brown coat he had slept in peasant huts from Moscow to Kieff. The Russian workmen loved him and trusted him, and he had come to know them and to believe in the integrity of their idealism. He had pity for these frightened fellows, but he was almost as bitter as a Red Guardsman at the breaking of parole, the stealing of passes, and the illegitimate use of the Red Cross car. “If I give him my coat they will recognize it and think me a traitor,” he said. I did not answer. I felt I had no right to plead with him against his principles. His Russian had completely deserted him. He turned to his interpreter: “Tell him I can’t give him my coat, but perhaps I can help in some other way,” he said. The interpreter obeyed, and the officer walked away with a hopeless, despairing shake of the head. We stood for a moment looking after him, both of us possessed of a frantic consciousness that something must be done to save these boys doing the bidding of the men who had left them in a trap. “Oh, if I could only speak this language!” I said, in a futile explosion of protest against my helplessness. “What would you do?” my companion asked. “I don’t know what I’d do, but I’d do something!” I answered, and started down the hall, deserted a few minutes earlier. Mr. Williams followed me. “Find him,” he said. “I can’t give him my coat, but I will leave it here, and he can come and take it.”