g letter from her.

In it she said: "I have just got hold of some French papers, and I see
that poor woman you told me about, has just died in Petersburg, and the
real story has now come out.

"It seems that it _was_ suicide after all, so your vision was quite
true!

"She had received large sums in advance for commissions from some of the
Russian nobility, and had either spent or speculated with them. That was
why she had to invent the story of an embezzling manager, to cover her
own shortcomings. But the truth was leaking out in spite of her
endeavours, and she made up her mind to commit suicide rather than face
the horrors of a Russian prison. The paper goes on to say that she chose
a most terrible death, little realising what the torture would be. It
seems that she waited till the middle of the night you described, and
then covered her whole body with oil, and set fire to it! This accounts,
of course, for the horrible shrieks you heard. In her awful agony she
seized a knife--that she had either secreted or found in her
room--rushed out into the passage in a blaze, and when the musjig tried
to stop her, she ran from him, and attempted to stab herself as she made
her way up the stairs. All this you seem to have seen accurately; also
the fact that the musjig pursued her and succeeded in wrenching the
knife from her hands before she had injured herself with it. The paper
mentions that a Russian gentleman had gone to the rescue when he heard
the shrieks, but this was before she had got hold of the knife, and it
was the musjig alone who saved her, in the end, from immediate death."

During this Russian visit we had gone down to Moscow from Petersburg,
and here again a curious adventure befell me.

It was, as I have said, in the height of the summer, and one was
thankful to have a large, handsome room, with three windows looking over
the square, and the famous Kremlin Palace in the distance. My room was
divided into two unequal parts, separated from each other by a door
which was, during the hot season, thrown wide open and _fastened back
securely_. Between this door and the one opening into the outer corridor
the washing apparatus stood, and also a wardrobe of white painted deal,
with a very poor lock to it, as I discovered later.

On retiring to rest the first night, I locked the outer door, undressed
in this ante-room, and finally hung up my gown in the wardrobe I have
mentioned. Then, after looking out of the wind