“Well, my lady, why didn’t you bring your smelling salts?” the captain demanded sarcastically, and proceeded to swear at him for a weak-stomached coward. Then he gave Drexel a violent shove. “Get out of here, and join the guard about the prisoners!” Drexel hurried across the court and out the gateway. By the curb stood two sleighs, in the front one Freeman, handcuffed, in the rear one Sonya, and about them stood a solid circle of gendarmes, and beyond these was a silent, unarmed crowd glowering helplessly on. Drexel trembled with a fierce impulse to hurl himself upon the guard, but reason told him that course would help Sonya none at all, and would be the end of him, and the end of any aid he might give her should he escape. A roar from the blazing house informed him that his trick had been discovered. He coughed. “I’m going to get a drink,” he remarked to the guards, and walked quickly to the nearest corner. Fortunately the street was empty; such people as were abroad were before the entrance of the court. He held up the skirts of his long coat and sprang away at his best speed. At the next corner he turned again, and at the next he turned once more. Luckily here stood a sleigh waiting a fare. Into this he leaped. “Quick--I’m after an escaped prisoner!” he cried to the driver. The man lashed his horse into a gallop, and at Drexel’s direction they sped for the Neva, crossed it, and entered the broad Nevsky Prospect, where they were quickly lost among the hundreds of darting sleighs. Here Drexel dismissed his sleigh, took another and drove southward to near the Marianskia Theatre. Here he again dismissed the sleigh, and once more he took another and this time ordered himself driven into the northeastern part of the city. He felt that for the time at least he was safe against capture. Now that the excitement of his escape was over, his whole being was torn with the agony of Sonya’s loss. He saw her march, calmly erect, down the stairway to her arrest, saw her sitting handcuffed in the sleigh; saw her, in his imagination, meeting a dozen dreadful fates, and, whatsoever they were, meeting them with the calm heroism of Joan of Arc upon the pyre at Rouen. And into his agony shot the breath-taking thought that she loved him, and he lived again that one supreme moment when he had held her in her arms. And then he recalled the cry of Freeman that they had been betrayed. But for this traitor, she would now be free! But for him, their love might have come to bliss! He sprang suddenly aflame with wild rage against this unknown Judas. Who could the traitor be? The desire to know, the desire for vengeance, mastered him. He knew of but one person at liberty with whom he might consult--Sabatoff; and he hurried away to his house.