this is to say that few who knew him in the
social world had any notion of the life he lived apart or guessed that
authority stood to him for his shield and buckler against the unknown
enemies his labors had created. Perhaps he rarely admitted the truth
himself. Light and laughter and music were his friends in so far as they
permitted him to forget the inevitable or to deride it.

Here in this room of eloquent shadows he was a different man indeed from
the fine fellow of the opera and the barracks--a haunted secret man
looking deep into the mysteries and weary for the sun. The brilliant
scene he had but just quitted could now be regretted chiefly because he
needed the mental anaesthetic with which society alone could supply him.
Pale and gaunt and inept in his movements, few would have recognized the
Sergius Zamoyski of the dressing-room or named him for the diplomatist
whose successes had earned the warmest encomiums of harassed authority.
Herein lay a testimony to his success which his bitterest enemy would
not have denied him. None knew better than he that the day of reckoning
had come for all who opposed revolution in Russia, none had anticipated
that day with a greater personal dread.

He closed the curtains, thankful that the Cossacks stood sentinels
without, and hungering for sleep which had been denied to him so often
lately. If he had any consolation of his thoughts, it lay in the
comparative secrecy of his present mission and the fact that to-day
would accomplish its purpose. The girl Lois had not confessed Richard
Gessner's secret and she would stand presently where confession would
not help her. As for this agreeable youth, who certainly had been her
lover, he must be coerced into silence, threatened, cajoled, bought.
Sergius remembered Alban's fine gospel of life and laughed when he
recalled it. This devotion to humanity, this belief in great causes,
what was it worth when a woman laughed and her rosy lips parted for a
kiss? The world is too busy for the pedants who would stem the social
revolution, was his argument--the rich men have too much to do to hide
their common frailties that they should put on the habits of the friars.
Let this hot gospeller acquire a fortune and he would become as the
others before a month had passed. The women would see to that--for were
not two of them already about the business?

He closed his curtains and undressed with a clumsy hand upon the buttons
and many a curse at the