st entering Rasputin's room at the palace when a flunkey told me
the news.

When a moment later I informed the Starets he smiled evilly, remarking:

"Ah! Then that further ten thousand roubles is due to Nicholas Chevitch.
If he calls when we return to Petrograd this afternoon, you must pay him,
Feodor. He has done his work well. Russia will be crippled for munitions
for some time to come."

On our return to Petrograd we found the city in the greatest state of
excitement. The succession of explosions had caused the people to suspect
that the disaster was not due to an accident, as the authorities were
fondly declaring, but the wilful act of the enemy. Rasputin heard the
rumour and piously declared his sympathy with the poor victims.

Yet we had not been back at the Gorokhovaya an hour when the man Chevitch
called, and at the monk's orders I handed him the balance of his
blood-money.

That same evening Hardt, the secret messenger from Berlin, arrived,
having travelled by way of Aboe, in Finland.

"I have a very urgent despatch for the Father," he said when he was
ushered in to me, and he handed me a letter upon strong but flimsy paper,
so that it could be the more easily concealed in transit.

At once I took him up to the monk, who was washing his hands in his
bedroom.

"Ah, dear friend Hardt!" exclaimed the Starets, greeting him warmly. "And
you are straight from Berlin! Well, how goes it, eh?"

"Excellently well," was the reply of the messenger from the Secret
Service Department in the Koeniggraetzerstrasse. "Germany relies upon you
to assist us, as we know you are doing. Count von Wedell has sent you a
letter, which I have handed to your friend Feodor."

"Read it, Feodor," said the monk. "There are no secrets in it that may be
hidden from our dear friend Hardt."

He spoke the truth. Hardt was the confidential messenger who passed
between the Emperor William and Alexandra Feodorovna, and nowadays he was
travelling to and fro to Germany always, notwithstanding that Russia was
at war with her neighbour.

At Rasputin's bidding I tore open the letter, but found it to be written
in cipher.

Therefore I sat down at the little desk and at once commenced to decode
it. It was in the German spy-cipher, the same used all over the world by
German secret agents--the most simple yet at the same time the most
marvellous and complicated code that the world has ever known.

The keys to the code were in twelve sentences