iend, have contrived to effect my freedom. Were it
not for you, I should ere this have been on my way to Saghalien, to the
tomb to which Oberg had so ingeniously contrived to consign me. Ah! you
do not know--you never can know--all that I have suffered ever since I
was a girl."

Here the statement broke off, and recommenced as follows:

"In order that you should understand the truth, I had better begin at
the beginning. My father was an English merchant in Petersburg, and my
mother, Vera Bessanoff, who, before her marriage with my father, was
celebrated at Court for her beauty, and was one of the maids-of-honor to
the Czarina. She was the only daughter of Count Paul Bessanoff,
ex-Governor of Kharkoff, and before marrying my father she had, with her
mother, been a well-known figure in society. Immediately after her
marriage her father died, leaving her in possession of an ample fortune,
which, with my father's own wealth, placed them among the richest and
most influential in Petersburg.

"Among my father's most intimate friends was Baron Xavier Oberg--who, at
that time, held a very subordinate position in the Ministry of the
Interior--and from my earliest recollections I can remember him coming
frequently to our house and being invited to the brilliant
entertainments which my mother gave. When I was thirteen, however, my
father died of a chill contracted while boar-hunting on his estate in
Kiev, and within a few months a further disaster happened to us. One
night, while I was sitting alone reading aloud to my mother, two
strangers were announced, and on being shown in they arrested my dear
mother on a charge of complicity in a revolutionary plot against the
Czar which had been discovered at Peterhof. I stood defiant and
indignant, for my mother was certainly no Nihilist, yet they said that
the bomb had been introduced into the palace by the Countess Anna
Shiproff, one of the ladies-in-waiting, who was an intimate friend of my
mother's and often used to visit her. They alleged that the conspiracy
had been hatched in our house, color being lent to that theory by the
fact that a year before a well-known Russian with whom my father had had
many business dealings had been proved to be the author of the plot by
which the Czar's train was blown up near Lividia. They tore my mother
away from me and placed her in that gray prison-van, the sight of which
in the streets of Petersburg strikes terror into the heart of every
Russia