a
look of dread painfully contracting her features.

As their mistress rose, the three women shrank instinctively backward.
To one understanding it, the act was pathetically familiar. An instant
later, however, the Princess cried out, "Caroline! It is you, then?" and
so turned deathly white and reeled a little till old Masha came to her
support.

"Sophie! You are not ill--_to-night_!" The new-comer, who had spoken
in French, halted near the door, an expression of dismay on her face.

Madame Gregoriev, however, laughed faintly, and the color began to creep
back into her cheeks. As old Masha left her to hobble briskly out of the
room, she continued, "No, no! I am perfectly well. It was only that
you--startled me a little. I--I thought it was--Michael Petrovitch."

Once more the face of the other changed, but she said nothing as she
came slowly forward, examining her companion the while with a critical
eye. She was the Countess Dravikine, Sophia's younger sister, who, a
year or two after Sophia's misalliance, had herself married remarkably
well: a young diplomat of the capital, already high in the graces of the
official world, and destined to rise steadily, through the clever
management of his wife. The Countess Dravikine fitted her adopted world
extremely well. She was a woman whose one tender sentiment was that
which she held for the sister of her youth. Otherwise she had, not
entirely without justice, been called heartless. She was, in any case,
admirably adapted for the life she had chosen. And strife social and
political, as well as every move in the great game of state intrigue,
were as the breath of life to her. She had not come through the fires
unsinged. There had been, nay, still were, whispers about her in her
world. But they were whispers such as heightened rather than tarnished
the brilliance of her reputation. For, whether wrongly or not, her name
had more than once been linked with that of the Iron Ruler himself.
This may or may not have been the reason for her presence to-night in
Moscow, whither she had journeyed to stand beside her sister at the
anticipated triumph. But whatever her motive, no one could deny that the
evening would gain by her presence. Here, beside her glittering sister,
she was superb, in her magnificently poised maturity, the voluminous
gauzes of her Paris gown floating like clouds about her: the numberless
opals in her hair and at her breast only continuing the delicate
coloring o