Excusing himself on some pretext Prince Yussupoff went upstairs, where the others waited--young Grand Duke Dmitri and two or three other men, and told them the incredible news. When he went back he had a revolver in his pocket. He and the monk resumed their conversation, which was on general topics. It was the first time Rasputin had visited Yussupoff or had any particular conversation with him. The prince was not a favorite at court, the empress especially disapproving of certain alleged episodes in his youthful past. For this reason young Prince Felix and the monk were on formal terms, and it took a great deal of diplomacy to persuade Rasputin to make that midnight visit at all. They resumed their interrupted conversation, and in the course of it the prince invited Rasputin to cross the room and look at an ikon, or sacred picture, which hung on the opposite wall. These ikons are frequently rare objects of art, gold or silver, and incrusted with gems. The ikon, which was to be the last on which Rasputin’s gaze was to rest, was an antique of almost priceless value. He looked, and the next moment a revolver shot tore through his side and he crumpled up on the floor without a groan. Prince Yussupoff had shot him. The prince had never killed a man before, and it was natural that, in his revulsion of nerves after the deed, he should have rushed from the room. He fled upstairs and gasped out that it was over, the thing they had sworn to do was done, Rasputin was dead. The next thing was to get the body out of the house, and this task was rendered the more difficult because a policeman who had passed the house at the moment when the shot was fired, rang a doorbell and insisted on knowing what had occurred. He was pacified somehow, and one of the men went out to get a motor car. Prince Yussupoff went downstairs to guard the body until the car came. Rasputin lay motionless on the floor beneath the jeweled ikon, but as his slayer reached the spot where he lay, the monk’s body shot up, the monk’s long arms darted forward and his powerful hands reached and clawed for Yussupoff’s throat. Half mad with amazement and horror, the young man tore himself loose, leaving one of the epaulets from his uniform in the clawing hands. Rushing with all his might to the room upstairs, he shrieked: “He lives yet! He is the devil himself! We cannot kill him!”