ed thousand in his late mother's name, and fifty
thousand in his own. This was the personal property of the old
princess, a part of her dowry. The young prince made a wry face--the
money might last him two or three years, not more. During the lifetime
of the old princess no one had known accurately how much she
possessed, so that it never even entered the young prince's head to
ask whether she had not had more. He was so unmethodical that he never
even looked into her account book, deciding that it was uninteresting
and not worth while.

That same day the janitor of one of the huge, dirty tenements in
Vosnesenski Prospekt brought to the police office notice of the fact
that the Pole, Kasimir Bodlevski, had left the city; and the
housekeeper of the late Princess Chechevinski informed the police that
the serf girl Natalia Pavlovna (Natasha) had disappeared without
leaving a trace, which the housekeeper now announced, as the three
days' limit had elapsed.

At that same hour the little ship of a certain Finnish captain was
gliding down the Gulf of Bothnia. The Finn stood at the helm and his
young son handled the sails. On the deck sat a young man and a young
woman. The young woman carried, in a little bag hung round her neck,
two hundred and forty-four thousand rubles in bills, and she and her
companion carried pistols in their pockets for use in case of need.
Their passports declared that the young woman belonged to the noble
class, and was the widow of a college assessor, her name being Maria
Solontseva, while the young man was a Pole, Kasimir Bodlevski.

The little ship was crossing the Gulf of Bothnia toward the coast of
Sweden.

VIII

BACK TO RUSSIA

In the year 1858, in the month of September, the "Report of the St.
Petersburg City Police" among the names of "Arrivals" included the
following:

_Baroness van Doering, Hanoverian subject.
Ian Vladislav Karozitch, Austrian subject_.

The persons above described might have been recognized among the
fashionable crowds which thronged the St. Petersburg terminus of
the Warsaw railway a few days before: A lady who looked not
more than thirty, though she was really thirty-eight, dressed
with simple elegance, tall and slender, admirably developed,
with beautifully clear complexion, piercing, intelligent gray eyes,
under finely outlined brows, thick chestnut hair, and a firm
mouth--almost a beauty, and with an expression of power, subtlety and
decisio