manner, that manner which, years later, carried
him through the war with Japan. "It is all arranged. You are the
secretary of our protector whom Almighty God has sent to Russia for our
salvation."

My eyes met the piercing gaze of the unkempt scoundrel, and, to my
surprise, I found myself held mystified. Never before had any man or
woman exercised such an all-powerful influence over me by merely gazing
at me. That it was hypnotic was without doubt. The fellow himself with
his sallow cheeks, his black beard, his deep-set eyes, and his broad brow
was the very counterpart of those portraits which the old cinquecento
artists of Italy painted of criminal aristocrats.

In the Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence, in the great gallery in Siena;
in Venice, Rome, and Milan hung dozens of portraits resembling closely
that of Gregory Novikh, the man who, to my own knowledge as I intend to
here show, betrayed Russia, and destroyed the Imperial House of Romanoff.

In that look I had foreseen in him something terrible; I had read the
whole of his destiny in his glance. His gaze for the moment overwhelmed
me. Once or twice in my life--as it comes to most men--I have met with
that expression in the countenances of those I have come across: it
presaged crime, and the prophecy, alas! has been verified. Crime was in
Gregory Novikh.

Perhaps Rasputin--as the world called him and as I will call him--knew
that crime was in him. I think he did. By his eyes I knew him to be a
criminal sensualist with murder in his heart.

I had heard a whisper of his sordid and miserable elemental passions,
even though the Starets was, next to His Majesty the Tsar, the most
popular man in all the Empire.

To be appointed his confidential secretary was surely great advancement
at a single bound, for though sensuality was to him as natural as the air
he breathed, yet he had the highest society of Petrograd already at his
feet.

Compelled to accept my unwanted appointment, I bowed, and expressed
gratification that I should have been chosen for such a post.

"You must be discreet, my dear Feodor," said His Excellency, throwing his
cigarette end into the great bronze bowl at his elbow. "When I have sent
you upon confidential missions you have been as dumb as an oyster. This
new post I give to you because I know that you are a true patriotic
Russian, and if you see and know certain things you will never chatter
about them to the detriment of myself, or of our