“What Your Majesty has revealed to me this afternoon has utterly amazed me. I feel bewildered, for I see how dire must be the result if the truth were ever betrayed.”
“It will never be. You are the only person who has suspicion of it besides myself.”
“And I shall never speak—never!” I assured him gravely.
“I know that you are entirely loyal to me. I am Emperor, it is true, but I am, nevertheless, a man of my word, just as you are,” he replied, his intelligent face dark and grave. “Yes. I thought you would realise the seriousness of the present situation, and I know that you alone I can trust. I have not even told the Empress.”
“Why not?”
“For obvious reasons.”
I was silent. I only then realised the motive of his hesitation.
“I admit that Your Majesty’s request has placed me in a somewhat awkward position,” I said at last, bending forward in my chair. “Truth to tell, I—well, I’m hardly hopeful of success, for the mission with which I am entrusted is so extremely difficult, and so—”
“I am fully aware of that,” he interrupted. “Yet I feel confident that you, who have saved my life on one occasion, will not hesitate to undertake this service to the best of your ability. Use the utmost discretion, and you may get at the truth. I do not disguise from you the fact that upon certain contingencies, dependent on the success of your mission, depends the throne of Russia—the dynasty. Do you follow?” And he looked me straight in the face with those big, round brown eyes, an open, straight, honest look, as became a man who was fearless—an Emperor.
“I regret that I do not exactly understand,” I ventured to exclaim, whereat he rose, tall, handsome and muscular, and strode to the window. The band of the Imperial Guard was playing below in the great paved quadrangle, as it always did each day at four o’clock when the Emperor was in residence. For a few seconds he stood peering forth critically at the long lines of soldiers drawn up across the square. Then the man whose word was law turned back to me with a sigh, saying: