In addition to their losses in ships and war materials, more than a hundred of Olga’s chosen and most devoted followers had lost their lives in the terrible warfare which knew no sparing of life, and it would be necessary to draft more men from Russia to replace them before the work could be carried on upon an adequate scale. Olga listened to the catalogue of disasters with frowning brows and eyes gleaming with hardly-suppressed fury. When it was over, she rose and spoke in a voice whose wonderful music and witchery seemed to charm all sense of misfortune for the time being out of the hearts of her listeners. A born queen of men, she knew when to wither with her scorn or to charm with her sweetness, and she was well aware that this hour of defeat and disaster was no time for reproaches or rebuke. So her voice was low and sweet, and almost pleading, as she reviewed the situation, which, for the moment, seemed so dark, and appealed to her followers, through those who commanded them, not to yield before a sudden and temporary misfortune, but to learn from defeat the lessons of victory. She reminded them of all that their ancestors and hers had lost at the hands of the Terrorists, the forefathers of the hated and arrogant Aerians, and she painted in glowing colours the glory and the boundless wealth that would be the reward of victory. Heavy as their losses had been, there was no reason why they should not repair them. She reminded them how, five years before, they had possessed but a single air-ship, and were only a weak and scattered body of revolutionaries. Now they possessed, even after all they had lost, an aerial fleet superior to all the vessels of the Aerian navies save two, and submarine cruisers swifter and more powerful than any that floated, save only the stolen _Narwhal_. More than this, they were now supported by a vast organisation numbering thousands of devoted men and women, any one of whom would give his or her life for the cause for which they were fighting. She only spoke for a quarter of an hour or so, but every word went home, and when she concluded with an appeal to their loyalty and devotion, the twelve members of the Council rose with one accord to their feet, and there and then spontaneously renewed the oaths of fealty to her person and dynasty which they had taken when they enlisted in her service. Every man of them was a scion of some once noble Russian house, and her cause was theirs in virtue of personal interest as well as that sentiment of blind, unreasoning loyalty which even four generations of freedom had failed to eradicate from the Russian blood. Olga thanked them with a tremor in her voice which, whether it was real or not, spoke to them with far greater eloquence than words, and then she bade Lossenski lay before the Council the plans which she had already discussed with him for the future conduct of the vast enterprise which had opened so inauspiciously.