as unalterable. Nor
was his feeling of repugnance towards her softened, either by this
incident, or by her later well-acted but over-theatrical appeal to his
pity, his former affection for her, for the possible restoration of his
consideration, even though entire forgiveness for the irrevocable past
should be impossible. Ivan unfortunately read her too well. Did he do
her an injustice when he said to himself, bitterly, that Prince
Gregoriev was worth an attempt which would not have been wasted on Ivan
the composer?

It was noon on the fourteenth day of the month when Ivan re-entered the
lonely house at Klin, whence he was practically not to emerge for five
long years.

In the years between the October of 1879 and that of 1884, he performed
the hardest labor of his career. His life was one of Spartan simplicity;
nor, though about him Russia fainted beneath the terrible blows of
nihilist knouts, did he once lift his head to catch so much as an echo
of the furore. Unlike the majority of his fellow-countrymen, he took
little interest in the tempestuous history of the period. Still, the
event of March 13, 1881, did affect him powerfully enough to produce the
most beautiful of all requiem masses: one worthy of the martyrdom it
commemorated. For the Liberator met the base reward of his long and
arduous struggle to help his people as nobly as had his great American
predecessor, who, sixteen years before, had also fallen by a traitor's
hand. Yet it is said that none who had known him doubted, as they laid
the shattered form of Alexander down, for the last time, on the iron cot
of his soldier's room in the great Winter Palace, that the sigh of the
dying Czar was no confession of pain, but rather one of relief at this
swift solution of his unsolvable problem.

It was two years before the third of that royal name dared don his heavy
crown; and when that was done, it was Loris Melikov who became Czar.
But, though the secret societies might shriek and rave of the necessary
doom of the double tyrant to be downed, the people themselves had tired
a little of the everlasting howls of bomb-thrower and assassin; and
quieter years succeeded those of Russia's greatest shame.

Ivan, from his hermitage, took some part in the coronation festival;
for from his hand came the Triumphal March, and the great "Victory"
overture, played in the Kremlin Square by an orchestra of one hundred
and seventy pieces, augmented by bells and cannon.

This