The iron nerve displayed by the Empress of Russia when she learned that supreme disaster had befallen the house of Romanoff was in contrast to the emotion which overcame the deposed Emperor on his return to Tsarskoe Selo. At the time of his abdication, near the army front, he had behaved with dignity and self-command. He scornfully refused the whispered suggestion of one general that he escape in one of the high-power motor cars which always accompanied the imperial train. If the people wanted him to abdicate, he was ready to do so, and ready also to place himself at their disposal. Nicholas also showed himself to be a good Russian and no tool of the pro-German party, if reports are correct. When the news came that the army had gone over to the revolution some one near the Emperor, it is said, told him that there was one desperate way to avert the catastrophe. He could open up the Dvinsk front, let the enemy in, and thus by the sacrifice of his country save his dynasty. Nicholas refused even to consider such a crime. He committed many sins of cruelty in his time, and many more sins of stupidity. But in the end he showed himself no traitor. His return to Tsarskoe Selo was intended by Kerensky and the other members of the provisional government to be in accordance with his former rank, and orders were given to treat him with all respect and consideration. These orders, if Mme. Virubova is to be believed, were disregarded by the soldiers on guard at the Alexander palace, the home of the royal family. In my last talk with Mme. Virubova she spoke with deep feeling of the rowdy reception given the returning Nicholas. “They blew tobacco smoke in his face, the brutes!” she said. “A soldier grabbed him by the arm and pulled one way, while others clutched him on the other side and pulled him in an opposite direction. They jeered at him and laughed at his anger and pain. When he was finally alone with his family and intimate friends he could not contain his grief but wept unrestrainedly. We all wept, for that matter: we who loved him.”