"Pardon. But that is what it means. Any affiliated member who may be so ill-advised as to refuse to carry out the decrees of the Tribunal renders himself liable to the extreme penalty; and so surely as you, Gerald Brooke, are now a living man, so surely, in a few short weeks, should you persist in your refusal, will your wife be left a widow."
"This is horrible--most horrible!"
"Obedience, blind and unquestioning, the utter abnegation of your individuality to the will of your superiors, is the first great rule of the Propaganda to which you and I have the honour to belong. But all this you knew, or ought to have known, long ago."
"Obedience carried to the verge of murder is obedience no longer--it becomes a crime. However you may put it, assassination remains assassination still."
"Pardon. We recognise no such term in our vocabulary."
"Karovsky, had you been called upon to do this deed"----
"I should have done it. For if there be one man in the world, Brooke, whom I have cause to hate more than another, that man is Baron Otto von Rosenberg!"
"Von Rosenberg!"
"Pardon. Did I not mention the name before? But he is the man."
For a moment or two Gerald could not speak. "It is but half an hour since I parted from him," he contrived to say at last.--"Karovsky, I feel as if I were entangled in some horrible nightmare--as if I were being suffocated in the folds of some monstrous Python."