"Come," he bade Allard. "The last night is gone. Look at the city, John; the board of our royal chess, at which I admit checkmate."
Out over the velvet blackness studded with myriad points of light the three gazed quietly. Already faint rumors of carnival awoke here and there. The capital stirred in its sleep with dreams of the morning, the morning whose sunrise would be greeted from every fortress and ship of the empire by seventeen guns.
"Never did the purple-and-gold sands slip less regretted from the hour-glass," said Stanief, no faltering in the low tones which an hour before had carried dominion over a nation. "Only one sorrow I have to-night, Iría, when with you and John I lay down the life we know."
She leaned closer against his breast, as if to throw her frail body across the gates of destiny.
"And that one, Feodor?"
"Adrian," he answered. "So near to my heart lay pride in proving my loyalty, in convincing him of it and living down the lying distrust sown by his father and the court, so strong was my determination to lift my honor above disbelief and wear my ward's confidence as a decoration in all men's eyes. And I dreamed of helping him bear the heavy charge laid upon his slim shoulders. Fancies, boyish fancies wiser outgrown; I have learned better now."
"The world knows," she whispered.
"Yes; or will know. But I loved Adrian."
The quiet words fell with the last distant chime of bells. Listening, it seemed to Allard that no reproach leveled at the young Emperor could be so utterly hard to meet in the day of account as that wistful phrase.
Yet the spell of Stanief's tolerance lay on him also; the picture before him was not that of the familiar, ruthless autocrat under whom he lived, but of Adrian as he had stood in the little salon on the night of the drive, pushing back his tumbled dark hair with a gesture of infinite fatigue.