Colonel Orloff had a wonderful talent for music. On the very next day following upon the conversation which I have related, Madame Wyrubewa asked him to call on her in the afternoon, and to perform for her some melodies of Chopin which she knew were the favorite ones of the Empress. She also begged the latter to allow the Colonel to play for them, saying that it might interest her to hear him. Alexandra consented and, as in the case of David and Saul, she found a solace in listening to the wonderful music. Very soon she got into the habit of dropping in at her friend’s whenever she had a spare moment, and then Orloff would be telephoned for, and he used to come and hold the two ladies under the spell of his rare talent. Of course no one was admitted to these meetings and no one knew anything about them. At that time people did not trouble about the Empress of All the Russias, and her actions did not offer the slightest interest to any one, to the Emperor least of all. Colonel Orloff was something in character like the famous Count Fersen, the admirer and devoted friend of Marie Antoinette. He, too, had conceived a passion for his Sovereign, in whom he only saw the unfortunate, ill-treated, and misunderstood woman, and he conceived the thought to sacrifice everything for her service, to try and save her from the perils with which he saw her surrounded. And gradually, when his relations with her became more real and intimate, he, too, began to speak to her in the same sense as Anna Wyrubewa had done, of the necessity of trying to reconcile herself with her husband so as to be able to bring into the world that Heir after whom the whole of Russia had been longing for the last nine years or so.