Prince Yussupoff did not tell these facts directly to me. He told them to Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragist, with whom he is on terms of warm friendship, and gave her permission to repeat them to me, which she did within an hour of hearing them. Prince Yussupoff was willing that I should know the story, but our acquaintance was brief, and I am sure that I heard a more detailed account through Mrs. Pankhurst than I should have had had he talked directly to me, a comparative stranger. Prince Yussupoff did not kill Rasputin, as has been charged, because the monk had cast lascivious eyes on his beautiful young wife, the Grand Duchess Irene Alexandrovna. At least he said nothing about her in connection with the affair, and it is certain that she took no active part in it. She did not lure the monk to the Yussupoff palace on the fatal night. She could not have done so because she was in the Crimea at the time. Prince Yussupoff killed Rasputin because of the man’s evil influence on the Czar, his wife’s uncle, and his worse influence on the Czarina. The thing had got beyond scandal. It had become unbearable, and when evidence was presented to him that Rasputin was trying to influence the royal pair to force Russia into a separate peace with Germany, Prince Yussupoff decided that the time for Rasputin’s death had come. Rasputin had to die. He was invited to Yussupoff’s house and he accepted. Then he died. I have often walked past that great, beautiful, yellow palace on the Moika canal, the Petrograd town house of the Yussupoff family, and tried to reconstruct the ghastly drama enacted there on that December night. Snow burying the black ice of the canal, shrouding the street and silent houses, dimming the street lights, and in a basement room, a private retreat of the lord of the palace, a young man sweating from every shivering pore, and watching the sinister monk eat and drink deadly poison which affected him no more than water. They had fed one of the poisoned cakes to a dog, just before they sent them downstairs to be fed to Rasputin, and the dog died in a few seconds. Rasputin ate one and lived. Explain it who can, but cease to wonder that the Russians firmly believe that Rasputin was something more than human.