"He is compromised as Michael was, and will like him go to ruin. A band of good-for-nothing fellows are leading him astray."
"What can be done to counteract it?"
"Thou must go to the Technological Institute before three o'clock, let Nikolaus be called out, and make an appointment with him at his house."
This being all addressed to the young lady, Sophie, she replied that it would be difficult for her to carry out these directions on account of the slight acquaintanceship which existed between her and Nikolaus's family.
"Absurd ideas of propriety!" was "Schura's" indignant reply.
"But in what way shall I be able to influence him?" asked Sophie.
"Thou wilt speak to him in my name."
"Then your convictions no longer remain the same?"
"Revolting error!" was the reply.
I must now explain the meaning of this mysterious communication. "Schura" is the Russian pet name for Alexandrine. Nikolaus and Michael were her cousins. Michael, quite a young man, had unfortunately allowed himself to become entangled by the revolutionary ideas of our Anarchists or Socialists. He was arrested, tried, and condemned to imprisonment at a distance from St. Petersburg, where he lost his life in an attempt to escape. "Schura" loved him dearly, and fully sympathised with his political convictions, making no secret of it. After his death, which occurred in September 1884, she was discouraged in her revolutionary aspirations, and ended her life by poison, at the age of seventeen, on the 15th of January 1885, just one week before the séance above described. Nikolaus, Michael's brother, was then a student at the Technological Institute.