therefore, dangerous to the Court camarilla set up and paid
by Potsdam.

As the days passed the monk frequently referred to him as a thorn in the
side of the Empress.

"The fellow must be got rid of!" he declared to me more than
once. "He suspects a lot, and he knows too much. He is dangerous to us,
Feodor--very dangerous!"

One night, when we were together in his room at Tsarskoe-Selo, after he
had been dining _en famille_ with the Imperial family, he remarked:

"Things are going well. I saw the lawyer Altschiller to-day. All is
prepared for the coup against Stolypin, who is still ignorant that Vera
Baltz is in Petrograd."

I knew Altschiller, who often called at the Poltavskaya. He was a close
friend of Monsieur Raeff, whom Rasputin, when all-powerful a little later
on, actually appointed as Procurator of the Holy Synod, having placed the
appointment upon the Emperor's desk to sign!

The law case was, however, delayed. Hardt was on one of his frequent
absences--in Germany, no doubt--and matters did not move so rapidly as to
satisfy the Empress. The whole plot was to keep the Prime Minister in the
dark until the moment when the skeleton of his past should be dragged
from its cupboard.

As announced by Rasputin, the Emperor and Empress had visited Denmark and
Norway on board the _Standart_, and were back again at Peterhof, when one
day Rasputin received his friend Boris Stuermer, the bureaucrat, at that
time struggling strenuously for advancement. In the monk's den Stuermer,
chatting about Stolypin and the vindictive woman who had come to
Petrograd to destroy him--for he was one of the paid servants of Potsdam,
and in consequence knew most of the secrets--said:

"Have you, Father, ever met a Jew named Bagrov?"

"Never to my knowledge. Why?"

"Because I know from my friend Venikoff, one of the assistant-directors
of Secret Police, that the man, a discharged _agent-provocateur_ and
incensed at the way he has been treated by Stolypin, has joined forces
with some mysterious young woman named Baltz. There is a whisper that
between them they are engineering a plot to assassinate the Prime
Minister!"

Rasputin's strange eyes met mine. Both of us knew more than this
struggling sycophant.

"Bagrov?" the saint repeated. "Who is he?"

"Oh! A fellow who was assistant to Azeff in some disgraceful matters in
Warsaw--an _agent-provocateur_ who lived afterwards for some time in
Paris and on the Riviera. He attributes