On the day following the dismissal of the Pahlen Ministry Wilfrid received a visit at his hotel from Pauline; a welcome visit, for he was not so foolishly enamoured of the Grand Duchess as to be altogether insensible to the charms of other fair ladies, and Pauline with her bright smile looked very charming indeed at that moment. “I have been on a two days’ visit to Peterhof,” said she, “and returned only this morning to find all the city talking about you and your pictorial feat. I offer you my congratulations. You are a maker of history,” she continued admiringly. “_Ma foi!_ if some of the ladies of St. Petersburg could only see me now! How they would envy me my friendship with _le brav’ Anglais_!” Wilfrid’s mind turned to the one lady. Would _she_ feel envy, he wondered, could she have seen Pauline at this moment in confidential chat with him? “Now, at last,” continued Pauline, “I have learned why for three months you have lived an unsocial life, working mysteriously in an attic at the top of the hotel, any why, whenever I have called, you have looked cross at my coming, and glad of my going; and——” “I assure you, Baroness,” began Wilfrid, laughing, “that——” “Hush!” said Pauline, raising her forefinger playfully. “Don’t say it wasn’t so. I am not blaming you. You were engaged on a noble work.” Naturally Pauline was all curiosity to know whence he had learned the true account of Paul’s death. Wilfrid enlightened her; but, desirous of keeping his love-story a secret, he referred to the Empress’s intermediary as “a lady whose name I do not know, because she declined to give it”—herein stating nothing but what was true. “The Empress Mary,” he explained, “was very desirous that I should repeat the feat done by me at Paris. There, though my paint-brush failed in upsetting a government, it might succeed here in upsetting a ministry; and, you see, it has done so.” “But how came you to hit off the likenesses so well, for I am told the faces are perfect portraits?” “That’s easily explained. You know that for the space of a fortnight Paul’s body lay in state in St. George’s Hall. Twice a day the Court and the ministers heard mass beside the bier. By favour of the Empress I was provided with a coign of vantage where, unobserved, I could take surreptitious sketches of the ministers, to be reproduced on canvas. When the picture was finished, I placed, by preconcerted arrangement, a blue lamp in my attic window, and that same night the picture was fetched away by two men. Now you know the whole story,” he said in conclusion. “My patroness, the Empress, I have never seen; and, as for her fair intermediary, I have seen her but once only, namely on that strange night in the Michaelhof.” “But,” objected Pauline, “if you attended the masses held in St. George’s Hall, you must have seen the Empress Mary every day.”