I replied, "not now, Gregory; later."

"But I insist!" cried the Starets fiercely.

"And I refuse!" was my determined reply. "I have reasons."

Those last three words were not lost upon him, for Grichka was nothing if
not the very acme of shrewdness. Not an adventurer or _escroc_ in Europe
could compare with him in elusiveness.

"Well, Feodor, if you have reasons, then I know that they are sound
ones," he said. Then, turning to the "holy" conjurer, he grinned and
said: "Feodor is a most excellent secretary. So discreet--too discreet, I
often think."

"One cannot be too discreet in the present international crisis," I
remarked. "Enemy eyes and ears are open everywhere. One can never be too
careful. Russia is full of the spies of Germany."

"Quite true, Feodor--quite true!" exclaimed Rasputin, smiling within
himself. "Don't you agree, friend Rouchine?"

"Entirely," replied his accomplice, who, though he was well paid to
assist in working "miracles" before the peasants, never dreamed that the
Starets, who handed him money with such lavish hand, was the chief agent
of Germany in Russia.

Indeed, Rouchine's only son had been killed in the advance on Warsaw,
hence he held the Hun in abhorrence, and I am certain that had he known
Rasputin was the Kaiser's personal agent matters would have gone very
differently, and in all probability the enemy plots so cleverly connived
at by Alexandra Feodorovna would have been exposed in those early days of
the war.

The Russian nation even to-day still reveres its Tsar. They know that he
was weak but meant well, and he was Russian at heart and intent upon
stemming the Teutonic tide which flowed across his border. But for "the
German," Alexandra Feodorovna, not one in all our Russian millions has a
word except an execration or a curse, and as accursed by Russia, as is
all her breed, she will go down in history for the detestation of
generations of those who will live between the Baltic and the Pacific.

Rasputin grew indignant because I crushed the woman's letter into my
pocket without reading it aloud, but I knew well how to treat him,
therefore I began to explain all that I had learnt from the Secret Police
concerning the activities of Ivan Naglovski.

Both men listened with rapt attention.

"Then the fellow really intends evil?" asked the monk, as he laid down a
chicken-bone, for he always ate with his fingers.

"I fear he does," was my reply. "But Her Majesty wonders why y