ach was innocent enough in itself. At school, and
later on at the 'Varsity, he had consistently and steadily suppressed a
truth from friend and foe alike--namely, that he was in his own country
a prince. No great crime on the face of it; but a constant suppression
of a very small truth is as burdensome as any suggestion of falsehood.
It makes one afraid of contemptible foes, and doubtful of the value of
one's own friendship.

Paul was a simple-minded man. He was not afraid of the Russian
Government. Indeed, he cultivated a fine contempt for that august body.
But he was distinctly afraid of being found out, for that discovery
could only mean an incontinent cessation of the good work which rendered
his life happy.

The fear of being deprived of this interest in existence should
certainly have been lessened, if not quite allayed, by the fact that a
greater interest had been brought into his life in the pleasant form of
a prospective wife. When he was in London with Etta Sydney Bamborough he
did not, however, forget Osterno. He only longed for the time when he
could take Etta freely into his confidence and engage her interest in
the object of his ambition--namely, to make the huge Osterno estate into
that lump of leaven which might in time leaven the whole of the empire.

That a man is capable of sustaining two absorbing interests at once is a
matter of every-day illustration. Are we not surrounded by men who do
their work well in life, and love their wives well at home, without
allowing the one to interfere with the other? That women are capable of
the same seems exceedingly probable. But we are a race of sheep who run
after each other, guided for the moment by a catchword which will not
bear investigation, or an erroneous deduction set in alliterative verse
which clings to the mind and sways it. Thus we all think that woman's
whole existence is, and is only capable of, love, because a poet, in the
trickiness of his trade, once said so.

Now, Paul held a different opinion. He thought that Etta could manage to
love him well, as she said she did, and yet take an interest in that
which was in reality the object of his life. He intended to take the
earliest opportunity of telling her all about the work he was
endeavoring to carry out at Osterno, and the knowledge that he was
withholding something from her was a constant burden to an upright and
honest nature.

"I think," he said one morning to Steinmetz, "that I will writ