one of the
greatest of crosses to this man, who had known and cast away many a
heavier burden during his career. Remote as he was from the fashionable
districts, there was neither man nor woman in the city, from the
proudest house in the Equerries' quarter to the outskirts of the Novaia
Andronovka, but knew and shuddered, agreeably, at the Gregoriev
reputation.

It was not strange, then, that the affair of New Year's night had become
the sensation of the season. For on this night Prince Gregoriev had
vowed a triumph over the massed society of the Mother City. He intended
to accomplish now what his wedding with a daughter of one of the oldest
and most honored families had failed to do: what no use of his
unscrupulous power could force, what all Moscow society, for once banded
unanimously together, had sworn he should never accomplish--enter their
ranks, the ranks of the old nobility of the Empire.

By New Year's morning, however, the numbers were admitting, bitterly,
their defeat. Once more Gregoriev was about to achieve the impossible.
Eighteen years before, Moscow society had defeated him, superbly. At the
time of his marriage to a daughter of the Blashkovs, the question of
his admission into the "court circle" had been violently agitated. But
at that time even his prospective father-in-law had not had the
hardihood to suggest an informal presentation of this man to his
Majesty. Nay, it was the bride, pale, pretty, sensitive Sophia, who,
when it was seen that she had no slightest influence over her dread
husband, had been, not, perhaps, without a sigh, dropped from their
acquaintance by her former associates: nay, by her very family, all save
one sister, a girl younger than herself.

For eighteen years, then, the Gregoriev palace had stood in its
isolation, echoing only to the revelry that money can always obtain. For
eighteen years its master, buying what the world had to sell, had been
secretly planning to obtain what was not for sale: had faced, unmoved,
an isolation which, to a nature less strong, would have been unbearable.

Now, at last, he was about to win. His amazing intrigue had succeeded.
Its results were for the eyes of all men. For Moscow society had been
suddenly _commanded_ to his house, to a ball, given on New Year's night,
in honor of his Imperial Majesty Nicholas I., who had decided, by his
appearance, to honor the house of his subject and immediate servant.

* * * *