They were to develop far quicker than one could have imagined. The army had begun to discuss the position, and to comment upon it. Every one who had watched the march of affairs during the last months, felt that something was going to happen, but no one knew what it would be, or wished even to know it, so general was the discouragement that had taken hold of the public mind. There was, however, one factor left, which towered over the whole of the situation; that was the sincere desire on the part of the different political parties to try and keep back as long as possible a crisis which was recognised to have become inevitable, but which no one wished to see hastened. This feeling was such a general one that a member of the Duma, who for family reasons had come for a few days to Stockholm where I was residing at the time just before the Revolution, told me that no one had been more surprised than he when the news had reached him that it had broken out, because, though he had been convinced it was going to produce itself, yet he had never believed that it could take place so soon. Whilst this fearful storm was brooding on the horizon and getting nearer and nearer to him with each day that passed, Nicholas II. refused to listen to the thunder which was already resounding close to his ears, and was getting more and more determined to persist in the fatal resolution of holding his own against the tempest, and if necessary of using force in order to conjure and to subdue it. If ever the old Latin proverb, “Quod Deus vult perdere, prius dementat,” has ever been realised, it was in the case of this unfortunate Sovereign, who had fallen into the hands of an ambitious, cold woman, devoid of intelligence and of scruples, and incapable of appreciating the character of the people over whom she had been called upon to reign, and of whom she had been unable to conquer either the esteem, the respect or the affection, during the quarter of a century that she had lived in its midst. CHAPTER IV