“How good to see you again, Eulalia, after all these years,” she said, coming towards me; and she put her arms round me and kissed me. And in that greeting I realised that the Tsaritsa had not changed. She was still the affectionate and unaffected friend I had known years before. We had a hundred questions to ask each other, but almost before we had had time to begin, we had to stop talking to attend to the imposing ceremony which was beginning on the frozen Neva. From the window I saw that a pavilion, like an exceedingly decorative bandstand, had been erected on the ice, just in front of the palace, and I watched a procession of ecclesiastics in stiff Byzantine robes and glittering mitres move slowly across the road separating it from the palace, followed by the Grand Dukes and the Emperor. The singing of the choir floated to us through the frosty air and the Empress crossed herself devoutly. She is a sincerely religious woman. I watched the Emperor standing motionless beneath the fretted and gilded canopy of the pavilion, and the thought suddenly flashed into my mind that the Russian Emperors alone claim the right to govern the souls as well as the bodies of their subjects. The Autocrat is a great ecclesiastical personage as well as a secular ruler, and the Russian Church depends upon him and can do nothing without his consent. I remembered that banishment to Siberia was the punishment for those who deserted the Orthodox Church and refused to believe as the Tsar believes and to pray as the Tsar prays. The Kings of Spain and the Emperors of Austria are sons, not rulers, of the Church, and I had been taught that the Pope was king of kings. It seemed to me that no worse form of despotism could be conceived than the concentration in the hands of an autocratic ruler of the spiritual and temporal power and, as these thoughts crowded into my mind, there seemed to me something sinister and terrible in the ceremony I was watching, and I realised, as I had never done before, the immensity and the awfulness of the power [Illustration: Courtesy of Collier’s NICHOLAS II AND THE HEIR OF RUSSIA] wielded by the motionless figure beneath the gay pavilion. Nobody rejoiced more than I did when the Emperor published the Manifesto of April, 1905, granting his subjects religious liberty, and I realised that the stupendous claim which had made me shudder when I thought of it, as I watched the sumptuous Twelfth Day ceremony from the windows of the Winter Palace, had been renounced for ever. In point of fact, Nicholas II. had no desire to maintain it, and he renounced it as soon as an appropriate occasion arose.