“Rasputin simply said that the boy was going to get well, and he told us almost the day and the hour when the boy would begin to get well. ‘When the child is twelve years old,’ Rasputin told us, ‘he will begin to improve. He will improve steadily after that, and by the time he is a man he will be in ordinary health like other men.’ And very shortly after he turned twelve years old he did begin to improve. He improved rapidly, just as Rasputin said he would, and within a few months he could walk. Before that, when he went out it was in the arms of a soldier, who loved him better than his own life, and would have gladly given his life if that could have brought health to his prince. The man’s joy when the child really began to walk, began to play with his dog and his pony, was equaled only by that of the empress. For the first time in her life in Russia she was happy. Do you blame her, do you blame me for being grateful to Rasputin? Whether he cured him or God cured him, I know no more than you do. But Rasputin told us what was going to happen, and when it was going to happen. Make of it what you will.” Rasputin told the Empress of Russia that her son would begin to improve when he was twelve years old. Almost any doctor might have told her that it was not unlikely that he would begin to improve as soon as adolescence began. Many childish weaknesses, and even some very grave constitutional weaknesses, have been known to disappear gradually from that period. Empresses and ladies in waiting are not usually medical experts, but they might have learned that much from ordinary reading, if the doctors failed to enlighten them. But neither Alexandra nor Virubova knew it, and when Rasputin threw that gigantic bluff at them they grabbed it. As a guesser Rasputin was a wonder, for the almost impossible happened and the sick little Czarevitch lived up to his prediction. That’s what I make of it. When the Czarevitch grows to manhood, if he ever does, and reads the history of his father’s and mother’s last years as rulers of Russia, what a subject for reflection this whole Rasputin episode will afford him! He was the pawn shoved back and forth across the chessboard where the destinies of nearly two hundred million Russians, to say nothing of the Romanoff family, were being decided. He was the bait with which the biggest game in modern European politics was played. He and a wily monk and two women with a taste for mystical religion.