"Will you tell me the real meaning of this? I have already asked you."
"Sit down;" and he sat down himself, and lounged back easily in his chair. "By the way, have you lunched?"
"For God's sake man, don't trifle in this way. If you know the facts, as I suppose you do, you'll know I'm in no mood for bantering courtesy. Why am I torn away by your men by force at the very moment when my sister is in danger at the hands of the brute who has carried her off. I suppose you know all this. What does it mean, I repeat."
"You can understand, perhaps, Lieutenant, that as it is two days since my sister referred you to me, and you had left Moscow hastily, she was growing a little anxious. You know something of women in love and their insistent moods."
"To hell with all these plots and intrigues," I cried, furiously. "If you mean that that devil Devinsky is to have my sister in his power and I am to sit down coolly and bear it while you talk to me about marriage, you don't know me. I'll think of nothing, talk of nothing, do nothing, till I have either saved her and killed that villain, or am killed myself."
"Do you mean that you will set me at defiance?" cried the Prince, in stern ringing tones, his eyes flashing at me. "That you dare to flout the offers we have made you, and have the hardihood to set the needs of the country below your own little petty personal feelings and wishes? Do you know what that means, sir?"
"I care not what it means," I answered, recklessly. "I tell you this to your face. If my sister be not saved at once, I'll never set eyes on you or your sister again, unless it be that you make me grin at you from behind the bars of some one of your cursed gaols. That is my last word, if it costs me my life."
He rose and looked at me so sternly that I could almost have flinched before him if my stake in the matter had not been so great. I never met such a look of concentrated power before.
"If you dare to repeat that, Lieutenant Petrovitch, I will send you straight to the Mallovitch," he said, with positively deadly intensity of tone, pointing his finger through the window to where the gloomy frowning tower of the great prison was visible.
"I care not if you send me to hell," I cried. "Save my sister, or my hand shall rot at the wrist before I lift it in your service."