One day Alexis Orloff and Teplof appeared at Mopsa to announce to the deposed sovereign his approaching deliverance and to ask a dinner of him. Glasses and brandy were ordered, and while Teplof was amusing the Tsar, Orloff filled the glasses, adding poison to one of them. "The Tsar, suspecting no harm, took the poison and swallowed it. He was soon seized with agonising pains. He screamed aloud for milk, but the two monsters again presented poison to him and forced him to take it. When the Tsar's valet bravely interposed he was hurled from the room. In the midst of the tumult there entered Prince Baratinski, who commanded the Guard. Orloff, who had already thrown down the Tsar, pressed upon his chest with his own knees, holding him fast at the same time by the throat. Baratinski and Teplof then passed a table-napkin with a sliding knot round his neck, and the murderers accomplished the work of death by strangling him." Such is the story as it has come down to us, and as it was believed in Russia at the time. That Gregory Orloff was innocent of a crime in which his own brother played a leading part is as little to be credited as that Catherine herself was in ignorance of the design on her husband's life. But, however this may be, we are told that when the news of her husband's death was brought to the Empress at a banquet, she was to all appearance overcome with horror and grief. She left the table with streaming eyes and spent the next few days in unapproachable solitude in her rooms. Thus at last Catherine was free both from the tyranny of Elizabeth and from the brutality of her bestial husband. She was sole sovereign of all the Russias, at liberty to indulge any caprice that entered her versatile brain. That her subjects, almost to a man, regarded her with horror as her husband's murderer, that this detestation was shared by the army that had put her on the throne, and by the nobles who had been her slaves, troubled her little. She was mistress of her fate, and strong enough (as indeed she proved) to hold, with a firm grasp, the sceptre she had won. High as Gregory Orloff had stood in her favour before she came to her crown, his position was now more splendid and secure. She showered her favours on him with prodigal hand. Lands and jewels and gold were squandered on her "First Favourite"--the official designation she invented for him; and he wore on his broad chest her miniature in a blazing oval of diamonds, the crowning mark of her approval. And to his brothers she was almost equally generous, for in a few years of her ascendancy the Orloffs were enriched by vast estates on which forty-five thousand serfs toiled, by palaces, and by gold to the amount of seventeen million roubles. Such it was to be in the good books of Catherine II., Empress of Russia.