"I found the great monastery of Pokrovsky to be a dirty repellent hamlet of mujiks of the worst and most illiterate type. There was no trace of the marble palace which Rasputin had described as having erected as the main building of the monastery. The latter was, I found, a large, cheaply built, ordinary-looking house, three rooms of which were given up to the `Saint's' peasant-wife, his son Dmitri and the younger of his two daughters, while in the other part of the house lived twelve women of varying ages--the youngest being sixteen--who were his fascinated devotees and who had given up their lives in Europe to enter the seclusion of that sordid home and become his spiritual brides." Here Mademoiselle Aliyeff had an interview with the woman Guseva, and later on after an inspection of the police records at Tobolsk and Tyumen, she returned to Petrograd and reported the result of her visit to the Right Party in the Duma. Meanwhile, the Empress and also her favourite lady-in-waiting telegraphed to Rasputin urgently imploring him to return to Petrograd. But the verminous libertine was in too comfortable quarters with his dozen devotees to stir out far from his nest, and while going about the village standing drinks to all and sundry and ingratiating himself everywhere, he at the same time treated his old and ugly wife with brutal unconcern, and refused even to reply to the Imperial demand. At last he grew weary of his retirement--for, truth to tell, he usually retired there whenever he disappeared upon his many pretended pilgrimages in Russia--whereupon he one day sent a telegram to the Empress saying that he had at last been directed by a Divine call to again return to the bedside of the Tsarevitch. This message was received with the greatest joy at Tsarskoe-Selo, where it set a-flutter hearts in which beat the noblest blood of Russia. "The Holy Father is on his way back to us!" Such was the message whispered along the long stone corridors of the Winter Palace, the many windows of which look out upon the grey Neva. The Empress went to her son's bedroom and told him the glad news, laying a tender hand upon the poor lad's brow. And Madame Vyrubova meeting the Emperor as he came out of his private cabinet chatting with the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and the Minister Protopopoff, whispered the news into his ear. The Tsar smiled happily. Little did His Majesty dream that by that return of the unwashed scoundrel whom the most delicately nurtured women worshipped, he was doomed to lose his throne. On Rasputin's arrival some intensely dramatic scenes ensued--scenes that would be deemed fantastic if any modern novelist had dared to describe them even as fiction. But from these voluminous reports and the _dossier_ before me I shall attempt to describe them. CHAPTER TWO. SCANDALS AT THE WINTER PALACE. The rascalities of Rasputin were unparalleled, even in Russia.