er of losing not only her dignities but even
her liberty. For some time, it is said, she had been engaged in a
liaison with William Mons, a handsome, gay young courtier, brother to a
former mistress of the Tsar. The love affair had been common knowledge
at the Court--to all but Peter himself, and it was accident that at last
opened his eyes to his wife's dishonour. One moonlight night, so the
story is told, he chanced to enter an arbour in the palace gardens, and
there discovered her in the arms of her lover.

His vengeance was swift and terrible. Mons was arrested the same night
in his rooms, and dragged fainting into the Tsar's presence, where he
confessed his disloyalty. A few days later he was beheaded, at the very
moment when the Empress was dancing a minuet with her ladies, a smile on
her lips, whatever grief was in her heart. The following day she was
driven by her husband past the scaffold where her lover's dead body was
exposed to public view--so close, in fact, that her dress brushed
against it; but, without turning her head, she kept up a smiling
conversation with the perpetrator of this outrage on her feelings.

Still not content with his revenge, Peter next placed the dead man's
head, enclosed in a bottle of spirits of wine, in a prominent place in
the Empress's apartments; and when she still smilingly ignored its
horrible proximity, his anger, hitherto repressed, blazed forth
fiercely. With a blow of his strong fist he shattered a priceless
Venetian vase, shouting, "Thus will I treat thee and thine"--to which
she calmly responded, "You have broken one of the chief ornaments of
your palace; do you think you have increased its charm?"

For a time Peter refused to be propitiated; he would not speak to his
wife, or share her meals or her room. But she had "tamed the tiger" many
a time before, and she was able to do it again. Within two months she
had won her way back into full favour, and was once more the Tsar's
dearest _Katierinoushka._

A month later Peter was dead, carrying his love for his peasant-Empress
to the grave, and Catherine was reigning in his stead, able at last to
conduct her amours openly--spending her nights in shameless orgies with
her lovers, and leaving the rascally Menshikoff to do the ruling, until
death brought her amazing career to an end within sixteen months of
mounting her throne.

CHAPTER II

THE "BONNIE PRINCE'S" BRIDE

In the pageant of our history there are few m