"Ah! I was quite certain of it, General," remarked the "holy" man, with a sinister grin. "I discovered it quite by accident. Well, what have you done?"
"He and his wife are both under preventive arrest, pending an Imperial order. The papers we seized are conclusive. Among them was the enemy spy code. The whole case is quite clear, and there can be no defence."
"Then there will be a court-martial?"
"Of course. I have ordered it to be held on the seventeenth, in Moscow."
"They are both clever agents of Germany," the monk remarked. "Be careful that they do not slip through your fingers."
"No fear of that, Father," replied the general. "Possession of the German code is in itself sufficient to secure them conviction and sentence."
The latter was indeed pronounced ten days later. The little fair-haired woman, who was so devoted to Rasputin, and who frantically appealed to him in vain to save her, was sentenced to imprisonment for life at Yakutsk, in Eastern Siberia, while her husband, condemned for treason, was next day shot in a barrack square behind the Kremlin in Moscow.
Truly, Gregory the Monk swept with drastic and relentless hand any enemy who crossed his path.
It was about a week after I heard of the execution of the Governor of Kaluga that I happened to be at Tsarskoe-Selo again with my evil-faced master, being busy writing in the luxurious little room allotted to him.
Madame Vyrubova had been with us, discussing the condition of health of the heir to the throne, when, after she had left, there entered quite unexpectedly the Emperor himself.