“Trying not to let my voice tremble, I asked the girl when her father had left the house and with whom. ‘He left about midnight,’ she answered. ‘I don’t know whose motor car it was that came for him, but he told us he was going to call on Prince Yussupoff.’ I did not telephone the palace to ask about Rasputin. I went there as quickly as I could and told the Empress my news. ‘He went to see Felix?’ she exclaimed. ‘Why should he have gone there now, when Irene is in the Crimea?’ We looked at each other and the same kind of awful fear looked out of her eyes that had gathered in my heart. ‘Send for the chief of police at once,’ said the Empress. ‘Tell him to come as fast as he possibly can.’ It is almost too terrible for me to tell you. The police found the Yussupoff house in the most ghastly state of blood and--ugh!” she exclaimed, “it made me sick to hear them describe it, and it makes me sick just to remember it.” After a moment she continued, real feeling in her voice. “The thing was not difficult to trace. The Yussupoff boy denied everything at first, made up a silly story about a dog that had to be killed.” When Mme. Virubova said this I admit I shuddered. It was evident that she did not grasp the subtlety of that “silly story about a dog that had to be killed.” “While Prince Felix was still insisting that no crime had been committed the police found the hole in the ice, and around it, on the snow, many bloodstains. And then they found the poor corpse. They had killed him, first by shooting and then by every horrible means in their power. He was shot in the head and in the body, crushed and mangled almost beyond recognition. There was one frightful, ragged wound across his stomach which could only have been made with a spur, the doctors told us. When he had been beaten until he was helpless those men tied him up with meters of rope and threw him in the river to drown. He must have regained consciousness at the end, because he had dragged one arm partially free and by his hand we knew that he tried to make the sign of the cross. Yussupoff persisted in his denials until Grand Duke Michael and his son drove to the palace and told the Czar that they were all more or less in it, and that it had been a good thing to do. A good thing to murder and mutilate a defenseless man! Well, you asked me what a court was like.