im and--he obeyed. Olga Platanova was cast aside but not forgotten. He
became the husband of an unloved, scrawny lady of diadems. When the
situation became more than he could bear he blew out his brains.

When Olga heard the news of his death she was not stricken by grief. She
cried out her joy to a now cloudless sky, for he had justified the great
love that had been theirs and would be theirs to the end of time.

From a passive believer in the doctrines of her father and his circle
she became at once their most impassioned exponent. Over night she
changed from a gentle-hearted girl into a woman whose breast flamed with
a lust for vengeance against a class from which death alone could free
her lover. She threw herself, heart and soul, into the deliberations and
transactions of the great red circle: her father understood and yet was
amazed.

Then he was put to death by the class she had come to hate. One more
stone in the sepulchre of her tender, girlish ideals. When the time came
she travelled to Graustark in response to the call of the Committee of
Ten; she came prepared to kill the creature she would be asked to kill.
And yet down in her heart she was sore afraid.

She was there, not to kill a man grown old in wrongs to her people, but
to destroy the life of a gentle, innocent boy of seven!

There were times when her heart shrank from the unholy deed she had been
selected to perform; she even prayed that death might come to her before
the hour in which she was to do this execrable thing in behalf of the
humanity she served. But there was never a thought of receding from the
bloody task set down for her--a task so morbid, so horrid that even the
most vicious of men gloated in the satisfaction that they had not been
chosen in her place. Weeks before she came to Graustark Olga Platanova
had been chosen by lot to be the one to do this diabolical murder. She
did not flinch, but came resolute and ready. Even the men in the
Committee of Ten looked upon the slender, dark-eyed girl with an awe
that could not be conquered. She had not the manner of an assassin, and
yet they knew that she would not draw back; she was as soft and as sweet
as the Madonnas they secretly worshipped, and yet her heart was steeled
to a purpose that appalled the fiercest of them.

On a Saturday night, following the last visit of Truxton King to the
armourer, the Committee of Ten met in the underground room to hear the
latest word from one who coul