[Illustration: Russian soldiers at home in the Palace of a Grand Duke] [Illustration: Soldiers and factory workers took the place of striking telephone operators] [Illustration: Red Guards on duty before Trotzky’s door] It was midnight when I again returned to the hotel, which had in the meantime been recaptured by the Bolsheviki. This time they were taking no chances. The lobby and the upper floors swarmed with sailors. There were hundreds of guards where the day before there had been twenty. They had commandeered the entire second floor, and with machine-guns had taken positions in the front windows. The servants had fled. The beds were unmade. There had been no food in the hotel all day. Most of the residents had departed. Nearly a week had passed since the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, and we were still in utter darkness as to what was going on in the rest of the world. The last news from the outside was the joyous word that woman suffrage had carried New York State by 100,000 majority. It seemed incredible, as wild as the wild rumors that were pouring in from Siberia and the Caucasus; we did not dare believe it. Kerensky’s movements just outside the city continued to remain shrouded in mystery. I found my desk covered with messages from kindly members of the American colony, bent on rescuing me from the storm-center of Revolution. I read them over with a sense of pleasure--that pleasure which always comes with the knowledge that warm, friendly human guardian angels are standing in the offing; but I had not the slightest intention in the world of obeying any of the well-meant advice or accepting any of the gracious hospitality. Here under this very roof was the theater in which the tremendous revolutionary drama, involving the destiny of nearly two hundred million Russians and no one could say how many others of the peoples of the world, was being played. It was for this I had come to Russia. By the side of it personal security seemed a trivial thing. I put the notes away and went downstairs to talk with some of the sailors. Their conversation that night was chiefly of provocation. Again and again I heard the words, “Provokator! Provokator!” My Western mind had come reluctantly to the admission that provocation and Black Hundred plots were an actuality and not a nightmare of some dark age-long dead. I listened with interest to their charges against the monarchists, and wondered how much truth there might be in them. Coming down in the elevator next morning, I met Baron B. I had not seen him for several days, and frequently I had wondered what he was doing in the new crisis. I looked up at him as he entered the lift, and there was something in his face that made me shudder inside. “Where were you yesterday?” I asked, with as much self-control as I could muster. “We did not see you around, and we thought perhaps you had been arrested.” He laughed--a mirthless, cruel laugh that was more nearly a sneer.