She'd left there before she was sixteen!
"She had said things about her father and mother, and what she thought
of the ruling powers, and that same night--she'd been in Moscow two
days--she and her relatives disappeared. It leaked out through a
member of the secret police that she could have been saved by her
beauty--someone high up offered to get her free. But she preferred
another fate.
"She was sent to Siberia where her father and mother had gone, and had
died years before. My father met a man who had seen her on the way as he
was coming back. She was only just alive. The man was sure she couldn't
have lived more than a few weeks.
"Yet father wouldn't give up. He went after her.... But what's the use of
going on? He found the place where she had died.... Which ends that part
of the story, as a story.
"Only it didn't end it for us. It filled our hearts with bitterness. We
wanted revenge. Yet my father was too good a man to take it when his
chance came. His conscience held him back. But he talked--talked like an
anarchist, a man out to fight and smash all the hypocritical institutions
of society.
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