Always that land and people had appeared to her in sinister aspect; no doubt an impression acquired from reading melodramas written by Englishmen who, once upon a time, had given Russia preeminence as a political menace.
Russia, in all things--music, art, literature--the tragic note.

Stefani Gregor and Johnny Two-Hawks had roused the enmity of some political society with this result.

Nihilist or Bolshevist or socialist, there was little choice; and Cutty sensibly did not want her drawn into the whirlpool.
What a pleasant intimacy hers and Cutty's promised to be! And if he hadn't casually dropped into the office that afternoon she would have surrendered the affair to the police, and that would have been the end of it.

Amazing thought--you might jog along all your life at the side of a person and never know him half so well as someone you met m a tense episode, like that of the immaculate Cutty crossing the fire escape with Two-Hawks on his shoulders! She heard the friendly coal heaver going down the corridor to the door.
When he returned to the bedroom two men accompanied him.

Not a word was said.