PRESIDENT: Brothers, are you ready?

VERA (starting up): Not yet! Not yet! I have a word to say.

MICHAEL (aside): Plague take her! I knew it would come to this.

VERA: This boy has been our brother. Night after night he has perilled his own life to come here. Night after night, when every street was filled with spies, every house with traitors. Delicately nurtured like a king’s son, he has dwelt among us.

PRESIDENT: Ay! Under a false name. He lied to us at the beginning. He lies to us now at the end.

VERA: I swear he is true. There is not a man here who does not owe him his life a thousand times. When the bloodhounds were on us that night, who saved us from arrest, torture, flogging, death, but he ye seek to kill? –

MICHAEL: To kill all tyrants is our mission!

VERA: He is no tyrant. I know him well! He loves the people.

PRESIDENT: We know him too; he is a traitor.

VERA: A traitor! Three days ago he could have betrayed every man of you here, and the gibbet would have been your doom. He gave you all your lives once. Give him a little time – a week, a month, a few days; but now! O God, not now!

CONSPIRATORS (brandishing daggers): To-night! To-night! To-night!

VERA: Peace, you gorged adders! Peace!

MICHAEL: What, are we not here to annihilate? Shall we not keep our oath?

VERA: Your oath! Your oath! Greedy that you are of gain, every man’s hand lusting for his neighbour’s pelf, every heart set on pillage and rapine; who, of ye all, if the crown were set on his head, would give an empire up for the mob to scramble for? The people are not yet fit for a republic in Russia.

PRESIDENT: Every nation is fit for a republic.

MICHAEL: The man is a tyrant.

VERA: A tyrant! Hath he not dismissed his evil counsellors. That ill-omened raven of his father’s life hath had his wings clipped and his claws pared, and comes to us croaking for revenge. Oh, have mercy on him! Give him a week to live!

PRESIDENT: Vera, pleading for a king!

VERA (proudly): I plead not for a king, but for a brother.

MICHAEL: For a traitor to his oath, a coward who should have flung the purple back to the fools that gave it him. No, Vera, no. The brood of men is not yet dead, nor the dull earth grown sick of child-bearing. No crowned man in Russia shall pollute God’s air by living.

PRESIDENT: You bade us try you once. We have tried you, and you are found wanting.