enty-five, his
inbred pessimism was so deeply rooted within him, that mankind, always
interesting and to be studied as a theme, was to be fenced with, and
generally avoided as a living entity. He rose in his time, did Vladimir
de Windt, to be the Premier of Russia. But never again, throughout his
magnificent career, did he find in the eyes of any man the clear
truthfulness, the unselfishness, and the pathetic faith that he had
known and so loved in his lost friend, Ivan Gregoriev.

The end of Ivan's brief and brilliant career was like its beginning:
meteoric. On the 20th of April, a whisper against him whirled through
the _salons_. On the 30th it had become a murmur. From May 5th to May
19th, Petersburg had stood, with open mouth, craning its neck to catch a
glimpse of this monster of vice and crime. On May 21st, as Ivan walked
from the court-room, every eye had been averted from him, every skirt
drawn back from possible contact with that uniform which he had no
longer the right to wear. By the first of June, occasional furtive eyes
were seeking the chance to look through him once again; and their owners
wondered what signs of shame and misery they should have the joy of
reading upon his face. But, none of these eyes perceiving him, whispers
began once more to creep slowly round: in a weak-voiced inquiry about
the criminal. But, among all of those that asked, there was not one who
received an answer; though it was not till the middle of the month that
society, on the eve of departing to defile the country-side, paused for
a moment to lift its brows over the discovery that Ivan Gregoriev would
never be snubbed again. He had disappeared, absolutely, completely, out
of the ken of his former world; though it took infinite repetition to
convince everybody that even Vladimir de Windt did not know his address.
Certainly Ivan had accomplished a very unusual thing. Living still in
the midst of the world, he was lost to mankind; had vanished utterly
from sight or hearing.

Yet poor Ivan's decisive action might have been more difficult had he
known that, though his romance was over, there was yet to be a
postscript to society from Nice--an epilogue, as it were, to the
finished romance that had so inconsiderately turned itself into a
tragedy. Princess Shulka-Mirski, the intimate friend of the Countess
Dravikine, had received a letter, written in the first heat of the news
of the court-martial's verdict. To be sure, she tried to hi