he hall of Prince Galitzine's
house.

Thus it will be seen that Rasputin and his friends hesitated at nothing
in their frantic endeavours to gain their own sordid ends and to secure
victory for Germany.

CHAPTER IX

THE TRAGEDY OF MADAME SVETCHINE

"SISTER! thou who hast chosen to become the bride of Heaven, listen unto
me, and repeat these words after me!" exclaimed the monk Rasputin,
holding over the kneeling countess the big bejewelled cross which the
Empress had given him, and in which were set some of the finest jewels of
the Romanoffs.

"I will, O Father," replied Paula Yakimovitch, a pretty young woman,
whose husband was Governor of Yakutsk, far off in Siberia, and who had
begged him to leave her in Petrograd.

"Then repeat these words," said the bearded saint, fixing his weird,
hypnotic eyes upon her. "Thou art my holy Father--"

"Thou art my holy Father----" exclaimed the Governor's wife in obedience.

"To thee I bow, and to thee I acknowledge that thou art sent by Almighty
God to save our holy Russia."

She repeated the words amid the silence of that afternoon assembly of the
sister-disciples at the Starets' house, a gathering which included Madame
Vyrubova and her sister, Madame Soukhomlinoff; Madame Katacheff, wife of
the Governor-General of Finland; pretty little Madame Makotine, to whose
salon everyone scrambled; and old Countess Chapadier, bedecked, as
always, with diamonds.

"I hereby swear in my belief that God has sent to our Russia his divine
saviour in the human form of Gregory Rasputin, and that the sin I commit
in my belief is the sin which is easiest forgiven, and that by prayer and
fasting my sins will be remitted, even as I am admitted to the sect of
the righteous and holy."

These blasphemous words the young woman repeated after the unwashed
saint, who, standing upon a sort of dais in the big upstairs salon, still
held up the jewelled cross suspended from his neck in front of him.

"Salvation is in contriteness," the monk went on, for that was what the
sly scoundrel had invented. "Contriteness can only come after we have
sinned. Let us therefore sin, my sisters, in order to gain salvation! By
sinning with me," he added, having reached the apogee of his influence,
"salvation is all the more certain to come to you for this reason--that I
am filled with the Holy Spirit!"

"God be thanked! God be thanked!" fell from the lips of those thirty or
so bamboozled and hysterical w