"Yes," said the starosta quietly. "Yes, curse him and all his works.
What is it you want, little father--tea?"

He turned into the shop and served his customer, duly inscribing the
debt among others in a rough, cheap book.

The word soon spread that a carriage was coming along the road from
Tver. All the villagers came to the doors of their dilapidated wooden
huts. Even the kabaks were emptied for a time. As the vehicle approached
it became apparent that the horses were going at a great pace; not only
was the loose horse galloping, but also the pair in the shafts. The
carriage was an open one, an ordinary North Russian travelling carriage,
not unlike the vehicle we call the victoria, set on high wheels.

Beside the driver on the box sat another servant. In the open carriage
sat one man only, Karl Steinmetz.

As he passed through the village a murmur of many voices followed him,
not quite drowned by the rattle of his wheels, the clatter of the
horses' feet. The murmur was a curse. Karl Steinmetz heard it
distinctly. It made him smile with a queer expression beneath his great
gray mustache.

The starosta, standing in his door-way, saw the smile. He raised his
voice with his neighbors and cursed. As Steinmetz passed him he gave a
little jerk of the head toward the castle. The jerk of the head might
have been due to an inequality of the road, but it might also convey an
appointment. The keen, haggard face of Michael Roon showed no sign of
mutual understanding. And the carriage rattled on through the stricken
village.

Two hours later, when it was quite dark, a closed carriage, with two
bright lamps flaring into the night, passed through the village toward
the castle at a gallop.

"It is the prince," the peasants said, crouching in their low door-ways.
"It is the prince. We know his bells--they are of silver--and we shall
starve during the winter. Curse him--curse him!"

They raised their heads and listened to the galloping feet with the
patient, dumb despair which is the curse of the Slavonic race. Some of
them crept to their doors, and, looking up, saw that the castle windows
were ablaze with light. If Paul Howard Alexis was a plain English
gentleman in London, he was also a great prince in his country, keeping
up a princely state, enjoying the gilded solitude that belongs to the
high-born. His English education had educed a strict sense of
discipline, and as in England, and, indeed, all through his life, so in