pent-up misery of a woman tortured during the last hours beyond
every power of endurance. High God had heard her at last. Her son had
returned to her, unconstrained, of his own will, up from that depth,
from that nether hell, to the sounds of which she had been listening for
a long hour. But now her boy was clasped within her arms, his suddenly
burning cheek pressed to hers, his wine-tainted breath, mingling with
her half-restrained sobs as she cried over him only half coherently:

"Ivan--little one--son of my heart--you came back to me!"

"Oh, little mother! Little mother! Keep me safe--from _him_!"

CHAPTER IV

THE CORPS OF CADETS

In the old, feudal days of quick-spilled blood and easy death, there was
a certain fateful, epoch-making cry which had power to carry dread or
terror through the high ranks of the official world, while it brought to
others exultant hopes of desires and ambitions at last to be fulfilled.
It was a cry of life and of death, of the ending of one rule, the
beginning of another, consisting of two phrases from which nations took
their being; which were cried aloud by men in robes of mingled black and
white and punctuated by the breaking of a black, the flourishing of a
white, wand. It is the cry with which history ends and begins: "Le Roi
est mort! Vive le Roi!"

Now Russia, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was almost Europe
in the sixteenth. It was on February 18, 1855, that the reign of the
Iron Czar actually came to an end. But the news of his death was made
public in Moscow only two days later. For forty-eight hours the sudden
closing of that rule, which had been as sombre, as turbulent, as
tyrannical as that of any Borgia or Medici, was concealed from the
nation. But the morning of the twenty-first found the petty-official
world, risen early from sleepless unrest, pushing aside its early tea to
re-read the unexpected bulletin from the Hermitage.

High and low, from the Minister of the Interior to the humblest customs
inspector, waited, trembling, for the readjustment. But Michael
Petrovitch Gregoriev, who, it might have been thought, had good cause
for apprehension, came down from his bedroom at the usual hour, shut
himself into his sanctum, sat down to stare thoughtfully at a certain
portion of his hieroglyphic map, and then, with a deep, relieving sigh,
fared vigorously forth to the day's officialdom.

And it soon appeared that Monsieur Gregoriev's confidence was ju