, would have been impossible.
But he could still pin his thoughts down to the composition of two
or three state documents--reports requiring a liberal use of
imagination--before allowing himself the luxury of setting about
arranging his plan of retaliation: retaliation upon the great Czar,
his master. Thus it was that dawn, the late, wintry dawn, rising
seven hours later, fell upon his dishevelled figure stretched out
in a chair beside the paper-piled table, his heavy brows drawn down
in deep thought, his lungs filled with deep draughts of smoke drawn
from the pipe between his teeth.

The passage which led down to this dread room of his, opened also into
the office in which he conducted business with his colleagues, and which
was decorated and furnished with Oriental magnificence. The inner room,
of which only Piotr, his body-servant, had ever had so much as a
glimpse--the room that had sheltered this master of men and of evil at
the ebb and the flood of his power--was bare of ornament, and held not
one unnecessary article. The two windows were uncurtained; but outside
the customary double panes, the cracks of which were filled with pounded
wool, stretched a significant iron net-work which was embedded far in
the stones at the window-edges. Within, the four walls were covered with
staring, yellow plaster; only one side of it, that opposite the
working-chair, being partly covered--and that only by two big maps: one
of the Russian Empire, with its dependencies; the other covered with a
mass of line-tracery and unreadable jottings, written in what was
evidently a cipher. The key to this was hidden in the brain of the man
who had composed it.

Michael himself had dubbed this square of parchment a map: his map of
men. And it contained mention of some members in almost every great
family in the Empire. Nicholas himself was there, side by side with his
valet--a man, indeed, of vast importance in that ministerial world to
which a Gregoriev still aspired.

Finally, beside these things, high up in a corner of the east wall, was
the inevitable, dingy little daub meant for the blessed and blessing
Virgin: a superstitious but universal custom which even Michael
submitted to, and which represented, perhaps, his single remaining shred
of religion. For the rest, a huge table, a single chair, and two
bookcases filled with a small, but remarkably well-chosen collection of
reference-books, finished the characteristic arrangement of the