"Can you get me a permit for Olga to leave the country? That's more to the point."
"Yes—alone." There was a world of meaning in that single word.
"Then get it; and as soon as a railway engine can drag her across the frontier, she will be out of Russia, and out of my way, much to my relief."
She sat silent in perplexity.
"You can't go! You shan't go!" she cried. "You have made me do these things, whoever you are, and you must stay—for me."
I smiled. I had won. Then I changed as it were to a rather fanatical Nihilist, and cried warmly:—
"The ties that keep me here, Paula, are ties of death and blood; and such as no woman's hand can either fashion or destroy."
She looked at me long and intently and put her hands on my arms and her face close up to mine and said in a soft seductive tone:—
"If I get that permit, all shall be as it was?"
"All shall be as it was, Paula," I answered, adopting her equivocal phrase, and bent and kissed her on the forehead. But I was playing for a big stake: Olga's life probably, and my own certainly: and I could not afford the luxury of absolute candour at that crisis of the game.