'My God!' cried Litvinoff, springing up. 'How long will men bear it? Let us go back this very day, and kill and kill and kill these fiends as long as we have an arm to strike or a finger to pull a trigger.'
'We are going back,' Petrovitch said quietly. 'As for that deed, it is avenged. The man who was responsible for that murder got his sentence of death and his notice of it two days later. He lived through three months of terror, and then shot himself, to escape execution at the hands of some of us. Don't talk more of him.'
The two men sat silent for a little while, but Litvinoff's eyes still blazed with excitement. Petrovitch smoked quietly.
'How was it,' Litvinoff asked presently, turning from the other subject with evident effort, 'that you did not let me know directly you came over?'
'I did not see any good to be gained by it,' answered Petrovitch, who did not choose to tell his friend that he had waited to see with what grace the Prophet's Mantle was worn. 'I heard you speak at the Agora. I read your writings. You seemed to be doing good. Besides, it made concealment of my purposes more easy not to be known as Litvinoff.'
'Then what made you decide to tell me now?' was the very natural question.
Petrovitch hesitated, but only for a moment. Then he said,—
'Frankly, because I thought you were meditating an action that would afterwards cause you more regret than anything else you have done, and I wished to prevent it.'
'And that action was?'
'Taking another wife while your first wife still lived and still loved you.'