The shears of destiny

Her eyes swept the room with cold hauteur
By Leroy Scott
Author of “To Him That Hath,” “The Walking Delegate”
Illustrated by Alexander Popini
New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1910
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1910, BY THE SUCCESS COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1910, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY PUBLISHED, SEPTEMBER, 1910
THE SHEARS OF DESTINY
THE SHEARS OF DESTINY
INSTEAD of the week Drexel had thought his business would keep him in Moscow, two days sufficed. They were a pleasant two days, rich with promise of future profit, and it was with regret that he settled down in his compartment of the day express to St. Petersburg. He would have been glad had his business denied him a little longer the company of his aunt and his cousin Alice and the polished Prince Berloff.
Drexel gave little heed to the country through which his train shrieked and rumbled. And there was small reason that he should, for the land was monotonously flat, and made more monotonous by its vast blanket of sunless snow, beneath which it had been asleep these two months and which it would not throw aside with the awakening gesture of Spring for three long months to come. As far as the eye could reach there was only this gray-white, frozen desert—desolate emptiness, save where forests of spruce and hemlock lifted their myriad whited peaks toward the sullen sky, or a distant peasant village huddled low as if shivering with the bitter cold.
The pictures before his inward eye were far more interesting than this unvaried panorama unrolled by the snowbound land of his exile. He had reserved an entire compartment that he might think uninterrupted, and as the white miles flew behind him new visions of fortune, of power, of position, shaped and reshaped themselves in his rapid incisive mind. He longed impatiently to be back in Chicago—back with his uncle in the midst of things!