Her eyes swept the room with cold hauteur _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE “John, dear,” she said in purest English, “that bothersome passport must have been packed among your things” 16 Triumph glittered in the officer’s eye. “I believe I have seen madame before,” he said 136 A huge, ferocious fellow vaulted the barricade. He died in mid air 212 THE SHEARS OF DESTINY THE SHEARS OF DESTINY CHAPTER I THE WOMAN IN BROWN Instead of the week Drexel had thought his business would keep him in Moscow, two days sufficed. They were a pleasant two days, rich with promise of future profit, and it was with regret that he settled down in his compartment of the day express to St. Petersburg. He would have been glad had his business denied him a little longer the company of his aunt and his cousin Alice and the polished Prince Berloff. Drexel gave little heed to the country through which his train shrieked and rumbled. And there was small reason that he should, for the land was monotonously flat, and made more monotonous by its vast blanket of sunless snow, beneath which it had been asleep these two months and which it would not throw aside with the awakening gesture of Spring for three long months to come. As far as the eye could reach there was only this gray-white, frozen desert--desolate emptiness, save where forests of spruce and hemlock lifted their myriad whited peaks toward the sullen sky, or a distant peasant village huddled low as if shivering with the bitter cold. The pictures before his inward eye were far more interesting than this unvaried panorama unrolled by the snowbound land of his exile. He had reserved an entire compartment that he might think uninterrupted, and as the white miles flew behind him new visions of fortune, of power, of position, shaped and reshaped themselves in his rapid incisive mind. He longed impatiently to be back in Chicago--back with his uncle in the midst of things!