The son of the murdered man, who had ascended the throne over his father's dead body, had, at the turn of the year, listened for many an anniversary to the solemn strain, kneeling low, bedewing his _prie dieu_ with his tears; and one being there was who fully shared the sorrow of his heart. With every fibre that heart of his vibrated to the sad notes, a truer timepiece than the clock: it attuned its note to the triumphant strains of victory, as to the undertone of sadness when it reproached him that his father's corpse had been his stepping-stone to the throne, threatening that his body, likewise, should be the stepping-stone to his successor. This was the great trouble of his life; the ever-present torture of his soul. To no one had he confided it save to his wife. No one had ever comforted him in the hours of his agonized wrestling with that burden of grief save his wife. Now that is all over. The soul-destroying blue eyes, in whose depths he had sought a new heaven, gave him for heaven the cold, blue ether eternally separating earth from heaven for him. The Czar of all the Russias has no one in whom he can trust. The mightiest of the mighty has no place where he may sleep in peace. The most forlorn pilgrim of the desert is not so utterly alone as is he. When the last notes of the hymn has died away, and the husband, so long waited for, has not returned, the wife, rising, fetches a portrait of him painted upon ivory, and places it upon the table by the place he should have occupied. It is the portrait of a proud, heroic man, with smiling lip and unclouded brow--such as he was as a bridegroom. She gazes at it long, so long that her eyes are suffused with tears. Nothing is left to her of him but this portrait. He whom it represents has long ceased to smile. Two sledges, already horsed, are drawn up before the colonnade of the Winter Palace. One is harnessed with six horses, the other with three. Both are closed carriages with drawn blinds. The coachman and footmen belonging to the six-in-hand wear the livery of the Czar; those of the three-horsed sledge that of the Grand Duke. But, on getting into them, the Czar takes the Grand Duke's sledge, the Grand Duke that of the Czar; and as they pass out of the gates, with jingling of bells, the one sledge turns to the right, the other to the left. The six-horsed sledge is followed by an escort of the guards; where it halts, there halts the escort. The three-horsed sledge skims along the road unattended. It is known that the Grand Duke drives home direct; he is a domesticated man. But of the Czar none knows whither he will take his way in the course of the long night; and nowadays it behooves one to be careful; an escort has become a necessity!