ice. The windows
were closely curtained, and, during the long drive, not one glimpse was
to be caught of street or building. Nevertheless, Ivan knew that they
had not crossed the river. That meant that they were not at once to go
to the "politicals'" prison nor to the formal offices of the police. But
one house in this part of the town seemed likely to be their
destination. That was the gubernatorial palace: surely an unusual
destination, Ivan thought, even considering the crime for which they
were to suffer.

It was as they were finally alighting from the vehicle that Ivan's
companion, Stassov, managed at last to speak, in a whisper so rapid and
so low that Ivan barely caught it:

"We get our trial now. This examination will be all we'll have.--Be
careful."

Then, for the first time, Ivan's heart sank, terribly. Another instant,
and it was in his throat. Their destination had not been the palace of
the Governor; but that of the chief of the Moscow Third Section. Ivan
was entering his boyhood home!

* * * * *

An hour had passed. Ivan, Sergius, and four guards were sitting silently
in the antechamber to Prince Michael's inner room. They alone were left;
for, Stassov first, then Lemsky, had been led away into that dreaded
chamber, and had not returned. Of what passed at their examinations,
Ivan could only guess. But his imagination being now on fire, he felt
that the crossing of that threshold would be little less awful than that
of a doomed heretic into the torture-chamber of the Spanish Inquisition.
Of the memories, realizations, and foreboding of those sixty minutes, it
is difficult to speak, clearly. From the stunned calm of the first
moment of shock, Ivan had drifted gradually into a fever of acutest
feeling. To him, now, his situation assumed monstrous and distorted
proportions; for he expected no jot or tittle of favor from the father
who had cast him so completely out of his life. Moreover, back of all
the melodrama of the present, lay a black shadow of haunting memory:
memory of the house in which he sat; of his impressionable, childish
days within it; of Nathalie; of Ludmillo; finally, above all, her image
enveloped in a shining aura of passionate appreciation, his mother: of
the sorrow of her tender life; and the poignant bitterness of her death.
It was to this tapestry of the past that he added now his vivid mental
pictures of present events; the revelations concerning the