e Grand Duchess, but his
sleeper had already been booked, and he had to make a call _en route_ at
Vienna.

It was on the occasion of this visit with details of the location and
character of the club, that he first saw Sophia Kensky. He thought her
pretty in a bold, heavy way, and she regarded him with insolent
indifference. It was one of the few occasions in his life that he spoke
with her.

"The _gospodar_ is going to Kieff, Sophia Kensky," introduced the old
man.

"What will you do in Kieff, Excellency?" asked the woman indolently.

"I shall not be in Kieff," smiled Hay, "except on rare occasions. I am
taking charge of some oil-wells about twenty versts outside of the
town."

"It is a terrible life, living in the country," she said, and he was
inclined to agree.

This and a few trite sentiments about Russian weather and Russian
seasons were the only words he ever exchanged with her in his life.
Years later, when he stood, hardly daring to breathe, in the cupboard of
a commissary's office, and heard her wild denunciation of the man who
had sent her to death, he was to recall this first and only meeting.

Israel Kensky dismissed his daughter without ceremony, and it was then
that Malcolm Hay told him the result of his investigations. The old man
sat for a long time stroking his beard.

"Two more days they stay in this town," he said, half to himself, "and
that is the dangerous time."

He looked up sharply at Hay.

"You are clever, and you are English," he said. "Would you not help an
old man to save this young life from misery and sorrow?"

Malcolm Hay looked at him in astonishment.

"To save whom?" he asked.

"The Grand Duchess," replied Kensky moodily. "It is for her I fear, more
than for her father."

Malcolm Hay was on the point of blurting out the very vital truth that
there was nothing in the wide world he would not do to save that
wonderful being from the slightest ache or pain, but thought it best to
dissemble the craziest of infatuations that ever a penniless and obscure
engineer felt for a daughter of the Imperial House of Russia. Instead he
murmured some conventional expression of his willingness.

"It is in this club that the danger lies," said Kensky. "I know these
societies, Mr. Hay, and I fear them most when they look most innocent."

"Could you not get the police to watch?" asked Malcolm.

Had he lived in Russia, or had he had the experience which was his in
the following twelve mo