They lived together, of course, and entertained on the lavish scale which brought so many Russian families to poverty in the pre-revolution period. Marie was the most popular of hostesses, for she possessed that happy faculty of making each of her guests feel that the entertainment was got up solely in his or her honour. Months of riotous pleasure passed. Vassili Tarnowska's jealousy became a mania. He suspected every man he saw in his home, and his wife's flippant and contemptuous answers to his questions exasperated him. The beauty found it impossible to forgive or forget the fact that the husband she had once considered the most chivalrous man in all the world had been the only male to neglect her for other women. They were at breakfast one morning when Tarnowska was handed a telegram. Suddenly he leaned across the table and screamed a question to her. "What have you been doing to my brother Peter?" he cried. Marie could not speak. "Read that," said the count, as he thrust the telegram into her shaking hand. "Peter hanged himself last night." She read the message aloud in a voice that grated on him. "He was a foolish boy," she remarked indifferently. "I had forgotten his existence." The tragic fate of Peter Tarnowska was still being talked about when Alexis Bozevsky became the lover of the countess. He was the type of man who looks and acts like the hero of a melodrama. He was tall, with a superb figure, a moustache that seems to have been irresistible, a _bonhomie_ men and women were hypnotized by, and he was, undoubtedly, a past master in the art of pleasing romantically-minded ladies. He penned a couple of letters to Marie, which won her for him, body and soul. She ran the most terrible risks on his behalf once she was in love with him, and the woman who was a queen amongst men now gladly became the slave of this handsome officer of the Imperial Guard. The story of their love is brief and tragic and very melodramatic. It is difficult to believe that it all happened so recently as 1907. The jealous husband, the handsome lover, the cigarette-smoking Russian countess with the beautiful face and dark eyes--all belong to the stage; yet the Tarnowskas and Alexis Bozevsky were real personages, and two of them are living to-day. For some time Marie's latest conquest was unnoticed by her husband, who hoped that his brother's suicide would reform her. When he stumbled upon the truth he simultaneously resolved to kill Bozevsky in a duel. The first encounter between the jealous husband and the handsome lover took place in the house of the former. Tarnowska was armed, but he would not shoot a defenceless foe, and he flung on the table a revolver for his enemy. "We will settle it here," he said, with the laugh of a madman.