A couple of turns up and down the room cooled me.
"I don't want your life," said I, calmly. "Though it's dangerous to call me a coward, and were you other than what you are, I'd ram the word down your throat. With you, however, I'll deal differently. You say I was afraid to attend your last meeting. I'll do better than merely call that a lie, I'll prove it one. Call another meeting in as big a place as you can, pack it with all the deadliest cut-throats you can find, resolve to shoot me down as I enter the door, and if I dare not attend it, then call me coward—but not till then." My blood was up now, and I spoke as hotly as I felt.
"Will you come?" asked the man.
"Call the meeting and see. Nay, more. Between now and the time of the meeting think of the wildest and most dangerous scheme that you can to test what a desperate man can do for the cause, and give me the lead in it. And when I've failed, write me down traitor, and not till then. And now, go, or by God I may forget myself and lay hands on you."
My voice rang out in such sharp stern tones that the man's antagonism was beaten down by my earnestness. My fierceness seemed to fire him, and when I threw open the door for him to go, he stood a moment and stared into my face, his own all eagerness, light and wildness. Then he exclaimed in a tone of intense excitement:—-
"By God, I believe you're true after all." And with that he went.
It was not until the man had been gone some time and I was pacing up and down my room, still excited, and revolving the chances of this, perhaps the most desperate of all the complications which threatened me, that I saw a letter on tinted paper, lying on my table. I took it up and found it was from Olga, and my thoughts went back with a rush to her and to the circumstances under which I had left her that evening.
The letter was not very long.
MY DEAR BROTHER,
"I have not ceased to regret the hasty words I spoke to you this evening. Forgive me. Of course you do not think me a coward; and I can see now that you must have some other motive for wishing me to leave Moscow and Russia, while you remain here alone to face—what may have to be faced. But whatever your reason is, I cannot do it. Do you understand that? I cannot. That is stronger than I will not. I think you know me. If so, you know that I will not. If I thought you believed me capable of leaving you in the lurch after having brought all this on you, I should wish I had never had—such a brother. I will never even let you mention the matter to me again.