those busy soldiers, with their brass trumpets and their creaking
boots, were of an entirely different sort, not at all like those at
whom she had felt like firing a revolver.

"Come again!" she begged tenderly. And more came. The figures bent
over her, they surrounded her in a transparent cloud and lifted her
up, where the migrating birds were soaring and screaming, like
heralds. On the right of her, on the left, above and below her -they
screamed like heralds. They called, they announced from afar their
flight. They flapped their wide wings and the darkness supported them,
even as the light had supported them. And on their convex breasts,
cleaving the air asunder, the city far below reflected a blue light.
Musya's heart beat ever more evenly, her breathing grew ever more calm
and quiet. She was falling asleep. Her face looked fatigued and pale.
Beneath her eyes were dark circles, her girlish, emaciated hands
seemed so thin,-but upon her lips was a smile. To-morrow, with the
rise of the sun, this human face would be distorted with an inhuman
grimace, her brain would be covered with thick blood, and her eyes
would bulge from their sockets and look glassy,-but now she slept
quietly and smiled in her great immortality.

Musya fell asleep.

And the life of the prison went on, deaf and sensitive, blind and
sharp-sighted, like eternal alarm itself. Somewhere people were
walking. Somewhere people were whispering. A gun clanked. It seemed as
if some one shouted. Perhaps no one shouted at all-perhaps it merely
seemed so in the silence.

The little casement window in the door opened noiselessly. A dark,