in the way I had were first, to avoid interference, and secondly, to relieve him as far as possible from any suspicion of complicity. "Nobody now," I said, "can accuse you of having had anything to do with it. You were not here, and it is perfectly evident that I waited for the opportunity that your absence gave me." My explanation seemed to mollify him a little, and his old cordial manner gradually returned; but he warned me again that secret intercourse with political convicts, if I continued it, would almost certainly get me into trouble.
An hour or two after breakfast I was surprised and a little startled by the sudden reappearance of Captain Nikólin, the gendarme commandant of the political prison. He desired to see Major Pótulof on business, and they were closeted together for half or three-quarters of an hour in the major's writing-room. I was, at the time, in another part of the house trying to write up my notes; but Mr. Frost was at work upon a crayon portrait of the major's children in the drawing-room, off which the writing-room opened. At the first opportunity after Captain Nikólin's departure Mr. Frost came to me in some anxiety and whispered to me that he had accidentally overheard a part of the conversation between Captain Nikólin and Major Pótulof in the writing-room, and that it indicated trouble. It related to my intercourse with the political convicts, and turned upon the question of searching our baggage and examining my papers and note-books. As Mr. Frost understood it, Captain Nikólin insisted that such an investigation was proper and necessary, while Major Pótulof defended us, deprecated the proposed search, and tried to convince the gendarme officer that it would be injudicious to create such a scandal as an examination of our baggage would cause. The discussion closed with the significant remark from Nikólin that if the search were not made in Kará it certainly would be made somewhere else. Mr. Frost seemed to be much alarmed, and I was not a little troubled myself. I did not so much fear a search, — at least while we re-
