hes, when a noise
was heard in the court, and amid cries of "Here he is!" "We've got him,
Highness!" the poor Waska, bound hand and foot, was brought forward.
They placed him at the bottom of the steps. The Prince descended until
the two stood face to face. The others looked on from court-yard, door,
and window. A pause ensued, during which no one dared to breathe.

At last Prince Alexis spoke, in a loud and terrible voice,--

"It was you who sang, was it?"

"Yes, your Highness, it was I," Waska replied, in a scarcely audible
tone, dropping his head and mechanically drawing his shoulders together,
as if shrinking from the coming blow.

It was full three minutes before the Prince again spoke. He still held
the whip in his hand, his eyes fixed and the muscles of his face rigid.
All at once the spell seemed to dissolve: his hand fell, and he said, in
his ordinary voice,--

"You sing remarkably well. Go, now: you shall have ten rubles and an
embroidered caftan for your singing."

But any one would have made a great mistake, who had dared to awaken
Prince Alexis a second time in the same manner.

V.

Prince Boris, in St. Petersburg, adopted the usual habits of his class.
He dressed elegantly; he drove a dashing _troika_; he played, and lost
more frequently than he won; he took no special pains to shun any form
of fashionable dissipation. His money went fast, it is true; but
twenty-five thousand rubles was a large sum in those days, and Boris did
not inherit his father's expensive constitution. He was presented to the
Empress; but his thin face, and mild, melancholy eyes did not make much
impression upon that ponderous woman. He frequented the salons of the
nobility, but saw no face so beautiful as that of Parashka, the
serf-maiden who personated Venus for Simon Petrovitch. The fact is, he
had a dim, undeveloped instinct of culture, and a crude, half-conscious
worship of beauty,--both of which qualities found just enough
nourishment in the life of the capital to tantalize and never satisfy
his nature. He was excited by his new experience, but hardly happier.

Although but three-and-twenty, he would never know the rich, vital glow
with which youth rushes to clasp all forms of sensation. He had seen,
almost daily, in his father's castle, excess in its most excessive
development. It had grown to be repulsive, and he knew not how to fill
the void in his life. With a single spark of genius, and a little more
culture,