“So Sonya has told me.” Again those eyes peered from their purple hollows into his soul. “Pardon me if I seem to speak discourteously, but you do not care much for the principles for which we are struggling.”
“I do not know what my principles are,” he said frankly. “I used to have opinions, definite ones—a week ago. But now they are all unsettled and I seem to be awhirl with new ones. But this I do know: I am with you in this fight, and with you with all my heart!”
The White One slowly nodded, “Yes, I know we can trust you, and I know you are too useful a person to be refused. You have shown both.”
She looked at the three men. “I say yes. What do you say?”
“Yes,” they responded.
She again gave Drexel her withered hand. “Then you shall help us,” said she.
Whereupon Sonya and the three men clasped hands with him. He now learned the two men he had before seen were Dr. Razoff, a distinguished physician, and Pestel, a leader of the working-people. The third was an official in the Ministry of the Interior, which he had entered five years before for the purpose of gaining advance knowledge of the Government’s proposed action against the revolutionists. His name was Sabatoff, and as one of his functions was to secure and hold for use Government blanks of all kinds, together with counterfeits of the seals necessary to make them authoritative, he was known as “The Keeper of the Seals.”
The Central Committee met here under the very eyes of the police, but the police suspected nothing. They knew this old woman well enough under her true name of Madame Nikitin, for her long history was written down in their records; but she was to them a negligible person whose harm was long since spent—little more than a corpse awaiting a delayed sepulture. They knew that Dr. Razoff called frequently, but he was her attending physician. They knew of Sabatoff’s visits, but he was her man of affairs. Pestel they knew only as an irregular servant who came in to do the rough work in her apartment. They never guessed that this little coterie, seemingly summoned hither by routine business relations, were the people that the police of all Russia was exerting its every wile to discover and make prisoners.
They all drew about The White One and began to discuss what should be their plan to free Borodin from the Fortress of Saints Peter and Paul. “First we shall hear what Sonya has to propose,” said The White One. “Since we have chosen her as leader in this affair, and since Borodin is her brother, she has given more thought to a plan than any of us.”
They all looked at Sonya and waited. “I have a plan—yes,” she said. “But it is one I dislike, one I would suggest only as a last resort. Let us first discuss other possibilities.”