Suddenly she
brought her clenched fist down on the sill where her fingers had been
drumming.
"My God," she cried, "how can you sit there like an automaton with the
snow falling?"
Dorothy put down her pen.
"The snow falling?" she echoed. "I don't understand!"
"Of course you don't. You don't think of the drifts in Siberia, and
the two men you have known, whose hands you have clasped, manacled,
driven through it with the lash of a Cossack's whip."
Dorothy rose quietly, and put her hands on the shoulders of the girl,
feeling her frame tremble underneath her touch.
"Katherine," she said, quietly, but Katherine, with a nervous twitch
of her shoulders flung off the friendly grasp.
"Don't touch me," she cried. "Go back to your letter-writing. You and
the Englishman are exactly alike; unfeeling, heartless. He with his
selfish stubbornness has involved an innocent man in the calamity his
own stupidity has brought about."
"Katherine, sit down. I want to talk calmly with you."
"Calmly! Calmly! Yes, that is the word. It is easy for you to be calm
when you don't care. But I care, and I cannot be calm."
"What do you wish to do, Katherine?"
"What can I do? I am a pauper and a dependent, but one thing I am
determined to do, and that is to go and live in my father's house."
"If you were in my place, what would you do Katherine?"
"I would go to Russia."
"What would you do when you arrived there?"
"If I had wealth I would use it in such a campaign of bribery and
corruption in that country of tyrants that I should release two
innocent men.
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