"Perhaps so."
"There can be no doubt of your own loyalty to our cause, princess?"
"Certainly not."
"Are the others like you? Pardon me, there can be no others like you for there could never be another so beautiful and fascinating as you are. But are there others of your acquaintance high in position, who are working for the cause as diligently as you are?"
"They are many. Their name is legion."
They parted then. He to go about his several duties among the nihilistic sympathizers who could not return to Russia without including Siberia in their itinerary, and she to stride across the room and stand for a long time facing herself in the mirror, studying the features of her own beautiful face in an effort to detect there the fascinating qualities before which all men with whom she came in contact seemed so ready to succumb.
But her eyes were cold and hard as she regarded her own reflection in the glass. There was a fire in their depths which could have attracted no man, and which would have repelled all alike, for it was threatening and sombre.
Zara de Echeveria almost hated herself at that moment. Hated the beauty which gave her such power, and which exerted the magic that made slaves of men.
The hour came when she entered a carriage again to be driven to the steamship wharf; when she stood upon the deck near the rail, and gazed, as she honestly believed, over the house tops of a city she would never see again.
Fate, however, had builded differently for her, although she did not guess it; and she was going now to meet it as fast as the throbbing engines of the mechanical monster could bear her forward.