"For a long time," Knight went on, slowly, "father could not trace my mother. He expected to find the relations who had sent her word about the legacy, but they were gone--nobody could tell where. Nobody wanted to speak of them. They seemed afraid. Father went to the British and American Embassies; no use! But at last he got to know, in subterranean ways, that mother hadn't realized how dangerous it is to speak your mind in Russia. She'd left there before she was sixteen! "She had said things about her father and mother, and what she thought of the ruling powers, and that same night--she'd been in Moscow two days--she and her relatives disappeared. It leaked out through a member of the secret police that she could have been saved by her beauty--someone high up offered to get her free. But she preferred another fate. "She was sent to Siberia where her father and mother had gone, and had died years before. My father met a man who had seen her on the way as he was coming back. She was only just alive. The man was sure she couldn't have lived more than a few weeks. "Yet father wouldn't give up. He went after her.... But what's the use of going on? He found the place where she had died.... Which ends that part of the story, as a story. "Only it didn't end it for us. It filled our hearts with bitterness. We wanted revenge. Yet my father was too good a man to take it when his chance came. His conscience held him back. But he talked--talked like an anarchist, a man out to fight and smash all the hypocritical institutions of society. If it hadn't been for me he'd have killed himself in Siberia where his wife had died a martyr; and it would have been well for him if he had! "Because of the wild way he talked when suspicion of fraud was thrown on him by a partner the fool public believed in his guilt. He died in prison when I was fifteen, and I swore to punish the beast of a world that had killed all I loved. I swore I'd make that my life's work, and I have. But--God!--I've punished myself, too, at last. I'm punished through you, because I've fallen in love with you, Anita, and for your sake I'd give the years that may be in front of me--all time but one day to be glad in, if I could blot out the past!" "Maybe," the girl faltered, "maybe you're too hard on yourself. I can't believe that you, who have been so good to me, could have been very bad to others." "If I could hope you wouldn't be too hard on me, that's all I care for now!" he cried, passionately. "You remember my saying that night in the taxi that the worst I'd ever done was to try and pay back a great wrong, and take revenge on society? If I could hope you meant what you said about understanding I'd tell you the story of that revenge." "I _did_ mean it, Knight. My love will help me to understand."