The long table in the center of the room had been cleared, and behind it three men sat in a row. Two of these were the strangers who had come with Trant, and the cases they had carried, together with the one Trant himself had brought, stood open under the table. The man who sat between these two was Meyan. Near the table stood Miss Silber.
At sight of her, Winton Edwards made one swift step forward before he recollected the promise he had made, and checked himself. Eva Silber had grown pale as death. She stood now with small hands clenched tight against her breast, staring into the face of the young American she loved. Trant closed the door and locked it.
“We can begin now, I think,” he said.
He stooped at once over the instrument cases and brought out from them three folding screens, about eighteen inches square when extended, which he set on the table—one in front of each of the three men. At the bottom of each screen was a circular hole just large enough for a man’s arm to go through; and at Trant’s command the men put their arms through them. Stooping again swiftly over the instrument cases, Trant took out three sphygmographs.
He rapidly adjusted these on the arms of the three men, and set in motion the revolving drums, against which the pencil points traced their wavy lines on smoked paper. His clients, leaning forward in their interest, could then understand the purpose of the screens, which were designed to hide the pitilessly exact records from the three men.
For several minutes Trant allowed the instruments to run quietly, until the men had recovered from the nervousness caused by the beginning of the test.
“I am going to ask Miss Silber to tell you now, as briefly as she can,” he said, after a pause, “the circumstances of her father’s connection with the Russian revolution which brought him to the state you have seen, and the reasons why she has left you to go with this man to Russia.”
“To Russia?” broke from Winton Edwards.
“To Russia, yes!” The girl’s pale cheeks glowed. “You have seen my father, what he is, what they have made of him, and you did not know he was a Russian? You have seen him as he is! Let me tell you—you, who wear proudly the badge of your revolution fought in seven short years by your great-grandfathers—what my father was!
“Before I was born—it was in the year 1887—my father was a student in Moscow. He had married my mother the year before. The czar, finding that even the teachings he had been advised to permit made people dangerous, closed the universities. Father and his fellow students protested. They were imprisoned; and they kept my father, who had led the protest, so long that I was three years old before he saw his home again!