“You are right,” said she.
Freeman seized Drexel’s hand. “Splendid! Splendid! This is doing even more than I proposed to you!”
His lean face glowed with a sinister light, and he suggested, as one detail of their plan, that Prince Berloff be “executed” and the “execution” be left to him; but Sonya opposed that sanguinary course. Whereupon he volunteered several suggestions bearing upon their immediate plan of freeing Borodin; and although Drexel felt an inward shrinking, he had to acknowledge that Freeman was an adviser of wonderful shrewdness, of endless expedient, of intimate acquaintance with the conditions with which their plan must deal. Drexel would have preferred to work with an ally of less fearsome temperament, but that he was an ally of supreme efficiency there was no denying.
“You seemed to have some hesitation about Mr. Freeman at that conference in this room a week ago,” remarked Drexel, when the terrorist had gone.
“It is a peculiarity of our hunted underground life that we hardly know whom to trust,” was Sonya’s reply. “We are always suspecting one another. And for the moment we were not certain about him. He is too ruthless, he may be over-bold, but we can hardly doubt his sincerity. You remember the scene between him and Prince Berloff in the Hotel Europe.”
“I was present,” said Drexel.
“His course there was rash—but it proved that, whatever his faults, he is sincere, and it brushed away whatever suspicions may have risen in our minds.”
Presently Sonya withdrew to the lower floor, where she had a room in the quarters of the housekeeper and his wife, and Drexel went to bed in the adjoining room. The next day Sonya was for going straight to the governor, but she took the precaution to call up the Fortress by telephone to learn whether he was in. He was at the Ministry of the Interior for the day, she was told, and had left word that he could not be seen till the morrow. This postponement of action was a heavy disappointment to her but there was nothing for it but to wait.
Toward the end of the afternoon Sonya went out with the housekeeper’s wife, and Drexel was left to his thoughts. It was not long before the countess came into his mind. Even though it had been for the best, he felt a sharp, accusing shame over his desertion of her, and he wondered what had befallen her after he had leaped from the sleigh two nights before.
It occurred to him that perhaps he could gain some hint of her fate by applying to one of her servants, and he went out to a public telephone and called up her apartment house. To his surprise the voice that answered was the countess’s. In reply to his questions she said that if he would come to her she would tell him all.