'I am delighted to see you. I have not forgotten your kind interest in my lecture at the Agora. Please take that arm-chair.'
The other did so.
'I speak English not well,' he began. 'Perhaps the Herr Count speaks German?'
'Certainly,' he replied, in that language; 'but to my friends I am not Count, but Citizen Litvinoff.'
'I cannot claim to be a friend of yours,' said the other, who seemed to speak under the influence of some constraint; 'but I am a friend to the cause you advocate. I do not come to you for myself, but to ask you to help another, who is in sore trouble and distress.'
'I am very sorry. Who is he?'
'It is a woman. The wife of an exile, one of us, separated from her husband by circumstances I may not tell of, but which are not to the discredit of either.'
'What is her name?' asked Litvinoff, a shade more interested than if it had been the exiled husband who needed relief.
'I don't know her name,' said Hirsch; 'but she is very poor and very proud, and I am afraid very ill.'