The mock-monk, much against his will, returned to the Winter Palace where the Court had gone for a few days and only because of the Divine call, as he pretended. He treated the distracted Tsaritza with utter disdain when early one wintry morning he drove in from the Dvortsovy Square, passed the Palace Guards, and ascended the wide black-and-white marble staircase of the Great Hall, where she stood eager to receive him. "Ah! Forgive me! Forgive me, my Master!" implored the Empress in a low agonised tone. "I was thoughtless and foolish." "Take me to Alexis," said the charlatan roughly interrupting her. "He is ill--very ill--and God has sent me to him." Eagerly the Empress conducted him to the bedside of her son, the little Tsarevitch. Madame Vyrubova, the mistress of Rasputin, was awaiting him, together with two nurses and a physician named Letchitzki. With rough deep-voiced dismissal the unkempt profligate sent everyone from the room, including the Empress herself. He wished to pray by the sick lad's bedside, he explained. This he did, Madame Vyrubova alone remaining. When the door was closed the blasphemous rascal quickly bent over the Heir to ascertain that he was sleeping, then he raised his own dirty hands for Madame to kiss, crossing himself at the same time, and whispering "The drug? It seems to have acted well--eh? Where is it?" She slipped a tiny green-glass phial from her cream silk blouse and handed it to him, saying: "Yes, Badmayeff was right! Each time I gave it to him in his milk, he grew worse." "Ah!" laughed the verminous fellow, his sensuous face bearded and blotchy with drink. "Now that I have returned Divine Providence will restore him. He will not get his six drops each day!" The dastardly charlatan and poisoner of Russia's heir concealed the Thibetan drug in the folds of his ample habit, and whispering in his rough uncouth peasant way, "Now let the fools in again!" he threw himself upon his knees by the bedside commencing a fervent prayer. "O God--the Great! the Merciful! the Giver of all Bounties, the Creator, and the Death-giver--the Maker of Kings and the Destroyer of Nations--to Thee we pray--and of Thee we ask--" And as he uttered those blasphemous words the favourite lady-in-waiting opened the long white-and-gold door to admit the Imperial mother of the poor half-conscious elder son of the great House of Romanoff--the boy whose life was being trifled with by the administration of those pernicious drugs which, at any moment, when "Rasputin" willed, might cause death from haemorrhage.