ula Kereicha.

Rasputin was out with Azef, so Paula declared that she would wait till
their return.

"I am staying at the Hotel Chatham, and have to go to London to-morrow,"
she told me. "Krivochein has left the Chatham with his wife, and I am to
follow."

"The Father and Azef have gone round to the Chatham," I said. "They are
evidently hoping to find you there."

"Ah! Then I will return and see if they are there," she said, and,
rising, she left.

I did not see her again. She went to London next day, according to Azef's
instructions, and as a French governess took a room in that quiet hotel
near Victoria Station--the room wherein she was afterwards found dead.

At the time I had no knowledge of the tragedy, but later on I learned
from Rasputin's own lips, while in one of his drunken, boastful moods,
how he had introduced into the bottle of aspirin a single tabloid of one
of Badmayev's secret poisons, made up to resemble exactly the other
tabloids. With Azef he had gone to the Hotel Chatham on purpose to
extract from her dressing-case her own bottle of aspirin--which she had
purchased on the previous day from the same chemist in the Avenue de
l'Opera--and replace it by the one containing the fatal dose.

The latter she had swallowed in ignorance because of a headache, death
ensuing in a few seconds, and the post-mortem revealed nothing.

"Ah! my dear Feodor, that girl knew far too much! Besides, we discovered
that, though she had been sent by our friend Azef to assist two of our
friends to bring 'Krivochein's' career to a sudden end, she had actually
warned him, so that he has succeeded in escaping to America to avoid us!"

CHAPTER VII

SCANDAL AND BLACKMAIL

AS the power of the monk Rasputin increased, so also my own social
position became advanced, until as the "saint's" confidential secretary,
and therefore as one who had his ear, I became on friendly terms with
half the nobility of Petrograd.

The pious fraud declared to true believers, "If you do not heed me, then
God will abandon you."

Leading as he was, freely and openly, a life of shameless debauchery,
wholesale blackmail and political intrigue, it is marvellous how his
power became so unlimited. To those who disbelieved in his doctrine or
in his divinity, he simply smiled evilly, and said: "If you fail to do my
bidding you will be punished by my friends."

Such warning was sufficient. Everyone knew that Rasputin's power was
already, i