'Do you still need advice?' he said, smiling.
'Yes,' she said, speaking quickly and eagerly, 'more than ever, for now I have made up my mind. I am quite certain that my money ought to go—not to simply alleviating the miseries that wring one's heart, but to helping to overthrow the system that causes them. I have felt it a strong temptation to help first the individual sorrows that I know of; but I know that the right thing to do is to help not those, but the revolution that will render them impossible. I am right, am I not?'
'Yes,' he answered. They were standing by the window. This was not the sort of thing that one settles comfortably into chairs to 'talk over.'
'But now you are going,' she said, with a saddened falling cadence in her voice, that made music for the man at her side, 'and I shall have no one to tell me what to do. Why need you go? Is there nothing for you to do here? Is Russia so dear that it pushes all other claims out of sight?'
'It is not that I am a patriot. I love Russia, I love my people, but I love England and her people too. But better than either do I love Liberty, and I must be where her enemies are strongest, where the battle is hottest.'
'If that is so,' she said, reflectively, with her eyes downcast, 'everyone who loves Liberty best should be in front of the battle too?'
'I think so; but each must think for himself,' he was beginning, when they both turned at the sudden opening of the door. Cora Quaid came in; her fresh face quite pale; a newspaper in her hands.
'Oh, how do you do, Mr Petrovitch. I did not know you were here. Clare, such a terrible thing has happened, dear; mamma has just seen it in the paper.' She held out the sheet and pointed to a paragraph headed, 'Shocking accident at Firth Vale.'
The paragraph told briefly of the death of Richard Ferrier, and of the discovery of Hatfield's body in the great tank, and concluded thus: 'The brother of the deceased, Mr Richard Ferrier, states that his brother went out for a stroll on the previous night in his usual spirits. There is no clue to any explanation of the catastrophe, save that the man Hatfield was formerly employed in this mill, and had been heard to say that he considered himself personally aggrieved at the closing of it. He was supposed to be in the south of England, and it is rumoured that he secretly returned to wreak vengeance on the young masters of the mill for the part they had taken in closing it.'