“There is only one word in English to describe it,” replied Mme. Virubova. “That word is ‘rotten.’ A court is made up of numberless little cliques, each one with its endless gossip, its whisperings, its secrets and its plots, big and small. There is nothing too big or too small for these cliques to concern themselves with. They plot international political changes, and they plot private murders. They plot to ruin the mind and the morals of an Emperor, and they plot to break up a friendship between two women. They plot to raise this one to power and they plot to bring about the fall of another. They plot in peace and they plot in war. The person who lives at court and is not drawn into some of these plots is an exception to the rule. That is all that I can say. However, Rasputin, as I told you before, never lived at court. He did not even live in Petrograd. Most of his time was spent in Siberia, and he ought to have been in Siberia on the day he was murdered. But he had a home in Petrograd, where his wife and two daughters lived while the girls were being educated. Rasputin was very fond of those girls, and he was visiting them when that Yussupoff boy killed him.” Mme. Virubova usually spoke of Prince Felix Yussupoff as “that Yussupoff boy.” CHAPTER XIII MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT In an even, passionless voice Anna Virubova went on to tell me the story of the murder in the Yussupoff palace, as it had appeared to the slain man’s devotees in Tsarskoe Selo. “We knew that certain people were plotting to kill Rasputin. His life was attempted, you may know, at least three times. But it never entered our minds that Prince Yussupoff was in the plot. He was not a favorite with the Empress, who thought him a very dissolute young man. Still, he was in Tsarskoe once in a while, because his wife, who is a lovely girl, often came, and sometimes he came with her. On one of his last visits he saw the Empress. I was in the room and I heard him say, quite casually, that he had invited Rasputin to come to his house. ‘My wife wants to meet him,’ he said. “We thought no more about it, but on the morning after the dreadful thing happened one of Rasputin’s daughters called me on the telephone and asked me if I knew where her father was, and if not would I telephone the palace and find out if he was there. Some intuition seemed to tell me that something terribly wrong had occurred.