When all was calm, the Duma came into existence, in which representatives of every class met in Parliament for the first time. Troops were sent to punish the peasants, and many of them were flogged by the soldiers. Our peasants were not included amongst the offenders. The idea of whipping human beings was repellent to me, and, girl though I was, I felt that we, as a class, were responsible for the existence of many evils, and that it lay with us to try and remedy them. But whipping was applied to the guilty as the most effectual and the most easily understood antidote against rebellion: it is a barbarous punishment--in English eyes it must seem _utterly_ so; but these whippings were as naught compared with the savagery and super-refinement of torture inflicted later by the whipped upon the whippers. But my attention was soon to be diverted from rebellion and punishment. Shortly afterwards I went with my grandmother to Petrograd, where my marriage was arranged; in fact, I was already engaged when I was presented at Court. My fiancé was Captain Charles Dehn, of Swedish descent, whose ancestors had come into the northern provinces at the time of the Crusades, and the members of whose family were mostly generals or officers in the service of the State. Captain Dehn had taken part in quelling the Boxer Rebellion, and at the siege of Pekin he was the first officer to scale the walls of the Forbidden City in defence of the embassies. For this service he received the Order of St. George (the Russian Victoria Cross), and the Order of the Legion of Honour was awarded him by the ambassadors of the various nations represented in Pekin. On his arrival at Petrograd he was presented to the Emperor, who appointed him an officer on the “Standart,” and an officer of the Mixed Guard, whose members were chosen from various regiments, and many of whom were honoured by the personal friendship of the Emperor. Captain Dehn was a great favourite with the little Tsarevitch and the Grand Duchesses, and he used to play with them in their nurseries, his nickname with the children being “Pekin Dehn.” Both the Emperor and the Empress manifested the greatest interest in his engagement, and the Empress intimated to my grandmother that she wished to make my personal acquaintance. My engagement was formally announced in 1907, but we waited in Petrograd for a month before we were received by the Empress. The Grand Duchess Anastasie was ill with diphtheria, and the Empress was nursing her at the Alexandria Palace, Peterhof, where, until all danger of infection had passed, she had isolated herself from the other members of the Imperial family.