“I think Your Highness was—well, just a little indiscreet on the night of the Court ball,” I said. “Don’t you recollect that you spoke aloud when other people were in the winter garden, and that I queried the judiciousness of it?”
“Ah! I remember now!” she exclaimed, her face suddenly pale and serious. “I recollect what I said. Somebody must have overheard me.”
“And that somebody told Serge Markoff himself—the man who was poor Madame de Rosen’s enemy, and who has sent both her and Luba to their graves far away in Eastern Siberia.”
“Then you think that he is anxious to regain possession of those letters?”
“I think that is most probable, in face of your statement that you intend placing them before the Emperor. Of course, I do not know their nature, but I feel that they must reflect very seriously upon His Majesty’s favourite official—the oppressor of Russia. You still have them in your possession?” I asked.
“Yes, Uncle Colin. I feared lest some spy might find them, so I went up to my old nursery on the top floor of the Palace—a room which has not been used for years. In it stands my old doll’s house—a big, dusty affair as tall as myself. I opened it and placed the packet in the little wardrobe in one of the doll’s bedrooms. It is still there. I saw it only yesterday.”
“Be very careful that no spy watches you going to that disused room. You cannot exercise too much caution in this affair,” I urged seriously.
“I am always cautious,” she assured me. “I distrust more than one of our servants, for I believe some of them to be in Markoff’s pay. All that we do at home is carried at once to the Emperor, while I am watched at every turn.”
“True; only we foreign diplomats are exempt from this pestilential surveillance and the clever plots of the horde of agents-provocateurs controlled by the all-powerful Markoff.”
“But what shall I do, Uncle Colin?” asked the girl, her white hands clasped in her lap.