A friend of Mme. Virubova told me a still worse story concerning her imprisonment. Several times her father was visited by soldiers from Peter and Paul and made to pay large sums of money in order to insure his daughter from the most horrible indignities at the hands of the men who guarded her. He paid this blackmail. He had to. There was no power in Russia to appeal to, and Kerensky himself could not have prevented the murder or outrage of that lame and helpless woman in the fortress of Peter and Paul. She escaped the last insult men are capable of offering to women, and the government, after vainly trying to fasten the crime of treason on her, set Anna Virubova free under military surveillance. But they would not grant the Empress’s plea to send her friend back to Tsarskoe Selo. The first shock of dumbfounded amazement over, the royal family, which had never believed that it could be overthrown, regained its composure and accepted its destiny with quiet resignation. The Emperor became his adored son’s tutor, and the Empress her daughters’ constant companion. When spring came the whole family went out and made a garden. The hundreds of soldiers in Tsarskoe and thousands of people from Petrograd made pilgrimages to the palace grounds and watched through the high iron fence the former Czar spading up the ground and the former heir and his sisters planting and hoeing potatoes. The former Empress, in a wheeled chair or low pony carriage, for she was in feeble health, usually looked on smilingly. Of course, the Tavarishi, or at least the extremists in the Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates, resented the respectful and considerate treatment accorded the captive royalties. They kept up a constant clamor for the removal of the Emperor and Empress to some dungeon in Kronstadt or Peter and Paul. Every once in a while the newspapers published a resolution to that effect passed by a committee of the council in Petrograd or Tsarskoe, or in a city more remote. A dispatch from Helsingfors said that the crews of three warships lying near there had passed fiery resolutions demanding that the Czar be turned over to the tender mercies of the ruffians at Kronstadt. The crew of the cruiser _Gangoute_ went on record as saying: “This is the third time that we have expressed our will in this matter, and we have not been trifling. This is our last resolution. Next we shall employ force.”