Madame Wyrubewa had heard about Raspoutine a long time before she ever came to hear him. But after she had had the opportunity of meeting him she thought that it would not be a bad thing to bring him to Tsarskoye Selo, where the poor Empress was eating away her heart in her grief at the loss of all that she had cared for in life, and to try to induce Alexandra to listen to him, and to pray together with him. He was supposed to perform wonders by the intensity and the fervor of his prayers, and it might just be possible that the very fact of his being a complete stranger to her, and moreover a man totally outside Court circles and Court intrigues, would influence the Czarina to give him her confidence and to permit him to cheer her up. At all events, she spoke about him several times, and pleaded hard with the Empress to allow him to be brought to her. This Alexandra Feodorowna absolutely refused, but she was induced at last to consent to see him at the house of Anna Wyrubewa, and thither came one winter evening the adventurer who was in time to become the Cagliostro of a reign which was not even worthy to have any one else but a common, uncouth peasant for its jester. Now, as has been ultimately proved, Raspoutine was far from being the saintly man his admirers thought he was, but he was endowed with an unusual amount of cunning, and far more spirit of observation than he was credited with. When he was told that he would have the honor of meeting the Empress of Russia, and to pray in her presence for the health of her delicate little boy, he had at once perceived the advantages which might result for him out of this introduction, if only in regard to his personal prestige before his disciples and followers. He was above everything else a man who cared for his enjoyment as well as for the good things of life, and who, in the way of Paradise, only admitted the one described by Mohammed in his Koran. He had led a licentious, godless kind of existence, which he had contrived to persuade the weak women who had succumbed to his exhortations was in accord with the spirit of the doctrine which he preached, the principal points of which consisted in blind submission to his will and to his fancies. He had told them that they would be cleansed of their sins by a complete union with him, which he meant in the physical as well as in the moral sense of the word. It is probable that in his dealings with all the people who had grown to believe in him he had had recourse to his incontestable hypnotical powers and to practices of magnetic influence which he had learned amid some wild tribes of Siberia, where he had spent his childhood and early youth, who are to this day adepts in the art of witchcraft as well as in all kinds of magical rites and customs. At the same time the crafty adventurer knew very well that it would be unwise of him at the beginning of his intercourse with the Consort of his Sovereign, an intercourse which he was fully determined