"Your mysterious smile, fair Katina, disposes me to believe that you know the reason of the abbot's defiance." "I _do_ know it," asseverated Katina, "but I must not reveal it. Ask the marshal to make you one of the 'Transfigured,' and you will understand the mystery. Faster, faster, my little doves," she added, shaking the whip over the heads of her team. Onward flew the horses _ventre à terre_, and within an hour of the time of setting out, there glimmered into view the battled walls of Slavowitz, with its towers, spires, and domes standing out in gray relief against a background of blue sky dimly set with stars. "Shall I take the Troitzka Gate?" asked Katina. Trevisa nodded assent. "'T will save a circuit," he said, "and will serve to show my friend the two sides of Slavowitz. You have seen Cracovia, the fashionable suburb," he added, addressing Paul; "now take a view of Russograd, the Muscovite quarter." Katina accordingly drove through an arched gateway, where, armed with a long halbert, stood a Polish sentinel, who, at sight of Paul, saluted, mistaking him for an officer of the Blue Legion. As the troika, leaving the city gate behind, rolled forward over the smooth wooden pavement of the main thoroughfare known as the Troitzkoi Prospekt, it became quickly evident that the dwellers in this quarter had become aware both of the princess's Romanist faith and likewise of the duke's arrest,--matters that naturally tended to produce a state of great excitement. Indeed, it looked as if there would be little sleep that night in Russograd; for though the hour was late, all the denizens of the faubourg, men and women alike, were abroad, discussing in shrill tones and with fierce gesticulations this latest phase of Czernovese politics. Russians, Tartars, Cossacks, and representatives of other nationalities, who at ordinary times were ready to cut each other's throats, were now united by the bond of a common religion against "Natalie the Apostate." "Now the saints confound these Long-beards!" murmured Katina, compelled to exercise great care in steering her course. "Is it Butter-week, that they throng so? Our short route is proving a long one." Owing partly to the crowded state of the street, and partly to the condition of the wooden pavement, which a recent shower had rendered somewhat slippery, it was impossible for the vehicle to proceed other than at a walking pace, and thus the trio could not fail to overhear the remarks made by some of the throng. "I saw the duke brought in through the St. Florian Gate," cried a woman, addressing a circle of bystanders. "They knew better than to bring him in through the Troitzka Gate," observed a man beside her, apparently her husband. His face was disfigured by a long smear of dried blood.