When the man had taken his tip and departed, I said—
“Farewell, Irene.” My heart was too full to say more.
“No, no, Vladimir. Not farewell,” she sobbed, her large violet eyes wet with tears. “Au revoir. We shall meet again—some day.”
And, as the Continental train moved slowly out of the station, she kissed her tiny hand to me, again murmuring—
“Au revoir! I owe my life to you.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE BURLESQUE OF DEATH.
The Secret Police attached to the Russian Embassy in London are ever-watchful and untiring in their efforts to discover the plans and movements of our Party. It is, therefore, our constant endeavour to lead them upon false scents and direct their attention to quarters in direct opposition to that in which we are working.
No monarch possesses such a prodigious organisation of police spies and agents provocateurs as the Tzar. His emissaries are in every European city, and it must be admitted that for cunning and astuteness they are unequalled. Attached to each Embassy is the Okhrannoë Otdelenïe, consisting of some twenty or thirty detectives, whose duty it is to closely watch political suspects and forward elaborate reports of their movements to General Sekerzhinski, chief of the department at Petersburg.
The stratagems practised by these agents and their insolence are unbounded. In smaller States, such as Bulgaria, Roumania, Switzerland, and Italy, both law and political decency are violated, and these men act as if they were in a Russian provincial town. No one in the Balkan Peninsular doubts that the two Bulgarians who attempted to assassinate Mantoff, the Prefect of Rustchuk, when he was so imprudent as to go to Bucharest, were the tools of Yakobson, then third secretary of the Russian Embassy in Roumania. Again, it was proved that they offered people bribes to clandestinely introduce implements for false coining into the lodgings of a well-known literary man, the Russian refugee, Cass-Dobrogeanu. In dozens of cases attempts have been made—often successfully—to introduce bombs and explosives into the houses of Russian suspects abroad in order that they may be accused and imprisoned, thus removing their revolutionary influence. After a recent trial in Paris where six men were condemned to long terms of imprisonment for having dynamite in their possession, it was proved most conclusively that into the houses of four of them the explosive had been introduced by persons bribed by a provocating agent of the Tzar’s Government!