She set the measure down on the table, and took out of her valise a similar little flask to the one which held the white liquid. In this she carefully poured the contents of the measure, screwed the cap on as before, and hung it with the other on the chain round her neck. Then, woman-like, she turned to the mirror, threw back her cloak a little, and gazed at the reflection of the two flasks, which shone like two great gems upon her white skin. “There is such a necklace as woman never wore before, since woman first delighted in gems,--a necklace that all the jewels in the world could not buy. How pretty they look!” So saying, she turned away from the mirror and carefully put away all traces of the work she had been engaged in, then she threw off her cloak and turned the lamp out and got into bed again, to wait until the attendant called her at eight o’clock as she had directed. She did not go to sleep again, but lay with wide-open eyes looking at the darkness, and conjuring out of it visions of love and war, and the world-wide empire which she believed to be now almost within her grasp. In all these visions, two figures stood out prominently--those of Serge and Alan, her lover that had been and the lover that was to be,--if only the elixir did its work as its discoverer had said it would. As such thoughts as these passed through her brain, a new and perhaps a nobler conception of her mission of revenge took possession of her. In the past, Natasha had won the love of the man whose genius had made possible, nay, irresistible, the triumph of that revolution which had subverted the throne of her ancestors, and sent the last of the Tsars of Russia to die like a felon in chains amidst the snows of Siberia. What more magnificent vengeance could she, the last surviving daughter of the Romanoffs, win than the enslavement of the man descended not only from Natasha and Richard Arnold, but also from that Alan Tremayne whose name he bore, and who, as first President of the Anglo-Saxon Federation, had ensured the victory of the Western races over the Eastern? The empire of freedom and peace, which Richard Arnold had won for Natasha’s sake, this son of the line of Natas should convert, at her bidding, into an empire such as she longed to rule over,--an empire in which men should be her slaves and women her handmaidens. For her sake the wave of Destiny should flow back again; she would be the Semiramis of a new despotism.