dy." Saskia, looking
into the heart of the peats, began the story of which we have already
heard a version, but she told it differently, for she was telling it to
one who more or less belonged to her own world. She mentioned names at
which the other nodded. She spoke of a certain Paul Abreskov. "I heard
of him at Bokhara in 1912," said Sir Archie, and his face grew solemn.
Sometimes she lapsed into French, and her hearer's brow wrinkled, but
he appeared to follow. When she had finished he drew a long breath.

"My aunt! What a time you've been through! I've seen pluck in my day,
but yours! It's not thinkable. D'you mind if I ask a question,
Princess? Bolshevism we know all about, and I admit Trotsky and his
friends are a pretty effective push; but how on earth have they got a
world-wide graft going in the time so that they can stretch their net
to an out-of-the-way spot like this? It looks as if they had struck a
Napoleon somewhere."

"You do not understand," she said. "I cannot make any one
understand--except a Russian. My country has been broken to pieces,
and there is no law in it; therefore it is a nursery of crime. So
would England be, or France, if you had suffered the same misfortunes.
My people are not wickeder than others, but for the moment they are
sick and have no strength. As for the government of the Bolsheviki it
matters little, for it will pass. Some parts of it may remain, but it
is a government of the sick and fevered, and cannot endure in health.
Lenin may be a good man--I do not think so, but I do not know--but if
he were an archangel he could not alter things. Russia is mortally
sick and therefore all evil is unchained, and the criminals have no one
to check them. There is crime everywhere in the world, and the
unfettered crime in Russia is so powerful that it stretches its hand to
crime throughout the globe and there is a great mobilizing everywhere
of wicked men. Once you boasted that law was international and that
the police in one land worked with the police of all others. To-day
that is true about criminals. After a war evil passions are loosed,
and, since Russia is broken, in her they can make their
headquarters.... It is not Bolshevism, the theory, you need fear, for
that is a weak and dying thing. It is crime, which to-day finds its
seat in my country, but is not only Russian. It has no fatherland. It
is as old as human nature and as wide as the earth."

"I see," said S