“Then this will be the second time you have saved my life,” she said with a sort of resentment in her tone. “It makes it harder for me to say what I must say. Lord Courtenay, you must leave Russia at once. You are anxious to serve me, I know. It is a cold saying, but the best service you can do me is to put a thousand miles between us. Your continuance in St. Petersburg exposes me to suspicion. You have been the means, though innocently, of setting the Czar against me.”
Around her throat she still wore the gold chain with the locket attached, containing Wilfrid’s miniature. She hesitated for a moment and then detached the locket.
“The original cause of all the misunderstanding,” she murmured softly. “But for this Alexander, prompted by Baranoff, would never have begun to suspect me.”
She held forth the locket though her eyes told Wilfrid that she parted from it with sorrow.
He rose, took the locket and remained standing, perceiving that her interview with him was all but over. That pledge of his ill-starred love, the gold ring that he had given her on the previous day, was not now on her finger, and he wondered what had become of it.
“You will leave Russia without delay?”
“Your Majesty, I will.”
He had barely given this promise when he suddenly caught sight of a startling apparition behind the Empress’s chair. Alexander himself!—no longer the furious being of the previous night, but mild and gracious of aspect: nay, with a half-smile upon his lips.
Secreted near he had heard every word freely and spontaneously uttered by the speakers unaware of his presence, and thus had received convincing proof that Wilfrid’s relations with the Czarina had been, from beginning to end, of an honourable character.