The ordinary woman might very well have hesitated to comply with the marshal's request; but Katina was no ordinary woman. She walked a few paces off, placed the lamp upon the table in a suitable position, and then turning her back upon her visitors she began to unlace her jacket, and to loosen and cast back the white linen beneath. A startling act, truly, and yet performed with a modest air. Holding the last vesture in position by its neckband, she said in a bitter tone: "The ignorant have sometimes complimented me upon my beautiful figure. See with what justice!" The vesture dropped from her hand, and hung downward from her belt, leaving her form bared to the waist. The fall of that linen was a revelation! A sculptor would have been charmed with the fair rounded throat and white neck. But the torso below! It was no wonder that Katina made haste to hide it from view again. "Her bosom is the same," whispered Zabern, "or rather it is destroyed. The long lash of the knout coils completely round its victim, you know." "The knout!" cried Paul, thrilling with horror at the thought that such a dreadful instrument should have been applied to the delicate skin of a youthful maiden. If it had been Zabern's object to win Paul over to the Polish cause he had succeeded. The most eloquent oration against Russian despotism could not have wrought such effect upon him as the bared back of this silent maiden. "As there is a God in heaven, the nation that does such things must perish. What had she done to be treated thus?" While Katina was silently replacing her garments the marshal proceeded to whisper her story. "Katina's parents, who lived at Warsaw, gave shelter to a Polish patriot, and for this offence the whole Ludovski family were banished to the Uralian mines. "Here Katina's beauty attracted the desires of the governor, Feodor Orloff; and, sending for her he offered to restore her family to liberty, upon what conditions you can guess, when I tell you that Katina's reply was a fierce blow from her open palm. "The morrow happened to be the emperor's birthday, and Orloff with fiendish malice aforethought had the Polish exiles paraded before him, told them that they would be free from work that day, and in return for this boon required that they should cry 'God save the Czar,' Some refused, and among them the spirited Katina. Here was Orloff's opportunity. For disloyalty to the emperor, Katina was condemned to receive fifteen strokes of the knout. "Have you ever seen a knouting? No? Well, I trust you never will, for it is not a pleasant sight, even though your nerves be of iron. I have been compelled to witness many such scourgings in Siberia, and I tell you that though Dante in his 'Inferno' has imagined many and various tortures for the damned, none of them are equal to the agony that an expert executioner can elicit with a few strokes of the knout.