"Then, playmate, when he comes back, you'll have to stand up to him or—cut."
At that moment he saw before him the imagined picture of her face with the tears upon it.
"It isn't easy," she was saying. "If you knew my father, you would see. You can't withstand him, he looks so kind. You can't refuse him, because he seems to want nothing but your good. You can't say you won't have a splendid time with him, because you simply have it."
"Are you sure he is so bad?"
"I am sure," she answered gravely. "He is very bad. And it is not because he wills to be bad. It is because he wills to have power, and as if he were better fitted to have power than almost anybody—except that he is not good. Why, do you know what power he has? He wears a ring, the seal of the Brotherhood. Whatever order is stamped with that seal is carried out, even if it is thousands of miles away. When Ivan Gorof died"—she stopped, shuddering.
"What was that?"
"I can't tell you. It is too dreadful. He withstood my father. And when he was found, they picked up in the chamber a bit of red wax on a shred of paper—there was nothing else—but I know and we all know it was a part of the seal that held the warrant they read to him—the assassins—before he died."
"Did your father sentence him to death?"
"Who else? Sometimes I get thinking about it at night, and then it seems to me as if all the people in the world had been delivered into his hand. That is because I know I have grown to be afraid of him."
"Was he always cruel to you?"