“Oh, so you know! Well, what’s to be done? for so long as he keeps where he is, the Czar himself cannot lay finger upon him.”
“Let him abide. His arrest is but a question of time. You have the place under observation?”
“Trust me for that! He can’t sneeze without my knowing it. Let him but take six steps outside the Embassy and he is a prisoner.—To return to our useful friend Izak. He timed his journey admirably, arriving at the Silver Birch on the very night and at the very hour appointed by you, without creating any suspicion apparently in the mind of Lord Courtenay.”
“That, too, I know. Lord Courtenay has graciously obliged me by doing for nothing what I was willing to pay him three hundred thousand roubles for. So much the better for my pocket! Everything fell out precisely as I planned it. Thanks to Nadia the affair seems to have moved as smoothly as a piece of clockwork. Now, Grand Duchess Marie, proud and virtuous beauty, we will see how you look when you hear that your reputation is gone.”
As Loris caught the vindictive sparkle of his brother’s eye he said—
“You have never yet told me why you hate her so.”
Arcadius hesitated, then said with a sneer—
“The wisest man commits at the least one big error in his life-time. I committed mine when I made love to her.”
No man was better able to control his emotion than Loris Baranoff. On the present occasion, however, he sat perfectly aghast.
“You—made—love—to—her!”