him; the other children, in their hospital dresses,
were shoved brutally toward their places, menaced by butt and
bayonet.

"March!" bawled the officer in command.

But now, among the dark-garbed nuns, a slender white figure was
struggling frantically to free herself:

"You red dogs!" she cried in an agonised voice. "Let that English
woman go! It is I you want! Do you hear! I mock at you! I mock at your
resolution! Boje Tzaria Khrani! Down with the Bolsheviki!"

A soldier turned and fired at her; the bullet smashed an ikon above
her head.

"I am the Grand Duchess Marie!" she sobbed. "I demand my place! I
demand my fate! Let that American girl go! Do you hear what I say? Red
beasts! Red beasts! I am the Grand Duchess!----"

The officer who closed the file turned savagely and shook his heavy
cavalry sabre at her: "I'll come back in a moment and cut your throat
for you!" he yelled.

Then, in the file, and just as the last bayonets were vanishing
through the crypt door, one of the young girls turned and kissed her
hand to the sobbing novice--a pretty gesture, tender, gay, not tragic,
even almost mischievously triumphant.

It was the adieu of the Grand Duchess Tatyana to the living world--her
last glimpse of it through the flames of the altar candles gilding the
dead Christ on his jewelled cross--the image of that Christ she was so
soon to gaze upon when those lovely, mischievous young eyes of hers
unclosed in Paradise....

The door of the crypt slammed. A terrible silence reigned in the
chapel.

Then the novice uttered a cry, caught the foot of the cross with
desperate hands, hung there convulsively.

To her the Mother Superior turned, weeping. But at her touch the girl,
crazed with grief, lifted both hands and tore from her own face the
veil of her novitiate just begun;--tore her white garments from her
shoulders, crying out in a strangled voice that if a Christian God let
such things happen then He was no God of hers--that she would never
enter His service--that the Lord Christ was no bridegroom for her;
and, her novitiate was ended--ended together with every vow of
chastity, of humility, of poverty, of even common humanity which she
had ever hoped to take.

The girl was now utterly beside herself; at one moment flaming and
storming with fury among the terrified, huddling nuns; the next
instant weeping, stamping her felt-shod foot in ungovernable revolt at
this horror which any God in any heaven could pe