very good friend
Grichka. To him, remember, everything is permitted. You will learn much,
but rather than speak let your tongue be cut out. And that," he added,
looking at me very seriously as he lowered his voice, "and that, I warn
you, will be the judgment upon you in the fortress of Schluesselburg if
you dare to divulge a single secret of Russia's saviour!"

I stood aghast between this all-powerful War Minister in his glittering
decorations, the Emperor's right hand and confidant, and the unkempt,
ragged, wandering collector of kopecks--the man whose eyes held me in
their fascination each time they met my gaze.

The suddenness of it all bewildered me. The salary I was to receive, as
mentioned by His Excellency, was most generous, indeed, more than double
that which I had been paid by the Ministry of War. It meant luxury beyond
my wildest dreams; a life of ease, affluence, and influence.

Is it any wonder therefore that I accepted it, little knowing in those
days of peace that I was a pawn in the great game of the Hun?

How shall I describe Rasputin? My pen fails me. He was one of a few great
charlatans of saintly presence and of specious words, fascinators of
women, and domineerers of men, who have been sent to the world at
intervals through all the ages. Had he lived in the twelfth or thirteenth
century of our era he would no doubt have been canonised. This rough,
uncouth, illiterate Siberian peasant, who had been convicted of
horse-stealing, and of immorality, who had served years of imprisonment
in the gaol at Tobolsk, and who had only a month before we met been flung
out of a monastery in Odessa and kicked half to death by its inmates as a
fraud, had actually become the most popular person in Petrograd.

With the women of the aristocracy he was well-known, but to the Imperial
Court he had not risen. Yet, being a _protege_ of Kouropatkine, matters
were no doubt being arranged, although I was, of course, in ignorance of
the traitorous plans in progress.

On the following morning, according to my instructions given me by my new
chief, I called upon him at the small ground-floor flat which he occupied
in the Poltavskaya, close to the Nicholas Station. The house, the
remaining rooms of which were unoccupied, was a dark forbidding-looking
one, with a heavy door beneath a portico, and containing deep cellars
into which nobody ever penetrated save the Starets himself.

On the morning of my first visit there, I was,