hat watch your work to-day? They
shall give ye rather mockery. Finally, would ye leave to your children
legacies of wisdom that shall be as gold unto them? Lo! Such desire,
also, must be vain.

Dowered of Vision, Power or Wantonness, ye shall not escape this scourge
of Fate. Alone shall ye cut your way through the rock of Destiny up to
the High Place of Restitution. Yea! Solitary shall your labor be. But
out of solitude cometh, in good time, that Understanding of the Law that
all, at last, must seek--and find.

THE GENIUS

PROLOGUE

THE ANNUNCIATION

In the Western world of the revised calendar it was the evening of
January twelfth. In Russia it was New Year's night, of the year 1840.
The year was twenty-three hours old; for the bells of the three churches
in Klin had just chimed eleven times. But in "Maidonovo," a
country-place of the Gregorievs just outside the town, the mistress of
the house, Princess Sophia, had not yet gone to bed. She had been alone
in her bedroom for some time, and was now on her knees before a little
shrine presided over by a great, golden ikon, with its flaring colors,
and stiff, Byzantine figures of Mary and the infant Christ. There,
before the World-Mother, knelt the loneliest of unhappy women: daughter
of an old, impoverished Muscovite house, and wife, by necessity, of
Michael Gregoriev, a man of millions, chief of the Third Section in
Moscow: an official after the heart of the Iron Czar, and of Satan, his
master, too.

For nearly an hour the Princess had knelt on a heavily rugged floor, her
eyes lifted to the face of the Virgin, her lips revealing, in those
whispers that had become part of her life, the ever-living anguish of
her heart. She was in her thirty-third year, poor creature: had known
now sixteen years of married life--sixteen years of revelation, of
repulsion mental and physical, of misery not to be told. One by one her
little illusions, fancies, hopes, and, with them, all the graces of her
youth, had fallen from her, till there remained but a shadowy, faded
creature, holding, in the depths of her bruised soul, just one more
desire, one final hope, of which the very possibility was by this time
all but extinguished.

Yet it was of this hope she was speaking to-night to that distant,
shadowy Mary, who, her confessor had told her, can always understand and
always pity. Here, in the chill silence of her lonely rooms, while the
wide world without grew stiller an