“Good!” cried Michael. “You will promise—and strike!” Then the old general began to whisper a prayer, and stretched out his arms, like a great bat preparing for flight. Peter held the dagger in his hand, palm upward, and slightly extended before him, so that his elbow was a right angle with his upper arm, a pose somewhat similar to a man who holds a rapier in low carte ready to thrust forward the point. And he was close enough to Michael, so that if the arm was extended, the dagger would reach the old man. While the two of them were thus confronting each other, a low scream broke upon the room—a full-throated cry of sudden and complete horror. Peter turned to see Katerin in the door which led to the Kirsakoffs’ rooms. Her hands were thrown up and pressed against her cheeks, her staring eyes fastened upon the dagger in Peter’s hands, her mouth still open with the horror of her cry, and her body transfixed into rigidity by the astounding situation in which she found her father and Peter. The catastrophe which she had planned so carefully to avert, had come now, she knew. The delicate structure she had devised had crashed down during her absence, and she saw that Peter and her father were at each other’s throats, or so it appeared to her in the first glance she had of the interior of the room. She had returned from making the final arrangements for their escape, in happy confidence that Peter would never discover their identity—and here was Peter about to slay her father. She saw an end to everything—the man she looked to for safety was now to destroy them. She screamed again. It was a scream of utter hopelessness, a scream of black despair. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XXIV A NEW TUNE ON AN OLD FIDDLE PETER stood staring at Katerin, still holding the tiny dagger in his hand. A puzzled look had come into his face, as if he could not understand why she should scream. The mental shock which he had sustained in his discovery that the old man was Michael Kirsakoff, seemed to have closed some compartment of Peter’s consciousness which included Katerin in her relationship to Michael. Now the full fact of her personality intruded itself upon him in relation to what had happened and Peter’s brain needed time to readjust itself to a state of affairs in which Katerin must be considered. He lifted his empty hand to his face and drew his fingers across his eyes in a motion that suggested brushing something away which interfered with his vision. He threw back his head and shook it slightly, as if to clear his brain of a vapor which befogged it. An infinite weariness gripped him, and his eyes regarded Katerin as if she were some specter which had formed out of thin air and now stood between him and his vengeance, possessed of a supernatural power to thwart him in his desires.