r should affect
him so bitterly. He made all the familiar efforts: tried every resource
known to him of old. They failed. Not only had his tranquillity
departed; not only had his work been turned from joy to drudgery; not
only was the pleasant savor of his quiet existence gone; nay:
physically, mentally, he felt himself sick, and in want. His brain
played him false. His sleep deserted him. His carefully guarded
existence turned upon him, mocking.

Ivan at last began fully to realize what the past three months had done:
how, in them, all the old love-bitterness, all the accumulated
loneliness and hardship of his solitary years, piled together, had been
transmuted into a mighty hope, the destruction of which swept away his
carefully-reared edifice of artificial content. Out of all the women in
the world, he had wanted, had asked for, in all his life, none but
Nathalie. But her he had needed, terribly; and she was gone: gone out of
his yearning heart, and arms, and soul--for good!

It was now a long time since he had begun his reign in the house of his
fathers: that dreary house of evil name in which pure women had been
overcome as by some poison, some miasma of foul living, and, generation
after generation, had died there, down to his mother's day. This, for
more than two centuries had been the tradition of that grewsome palace,
till it was famed throughout the city for the sinister line of men who
had dwelt therein, and had finally died out with the last Prince. Ivan,
when he took up his residence there so suddenly, had put behind him his
memories of the old-wife's tales, and his own boyhood experience. This,
as he progressed farther and farther along the road of power, had become
easier daily until--a woman stepped in, and the power of Prince Ivan
faded and died. In the early days of his disappointment, he was beset by
all the ghosts of his fathers. Himself once more a prey to that black
Tosca that is the heritage of every thinking Russian, he yielded without
resistance to thoughts and memories as morbid and as dreary as those on
which his mother, years ago, had fed her dread disease. So, after a few
midwinter weeks of brooding, lassitude, and sleepless fasting, his
personal servants, there being no friend at hand to replace them,
ventured to remonstrate with their master. Piotr was now as much his
devoted slave as was old Sosha, who had recently retired from active
duty to the kitchen-corner, where his reminiscences a