They drove past the Winter Palace, empty of royalty, for the Czar, in fear of those he ruled, dared not trust his person there--past huge grand-ducal palaces--and presently they entered a great mansion that looked forth upon the ice-bound Neva. Drexel was well accustomed to the luxury of the rich Russian nobility, but even he, with his double reason for being dull to impressions, could but note that he had been in no house so rich as this. And he recognized that, save for the Czar and his immediate family, there were none prouder and higher in all the empire than these haughty men whose breasts were a blaze of orders and these haughty women who seemed to walk amid a moving fire of jewels. And of them all, he well knew, none had lineage older, nobler, than Princess Valenko. Drexel did not see the princess upon his entry, for interest in the famed beauty, long absent abroad, was high, and she had been swept aside into one of the drawing-rooms by an admiring group and was there the prisoner of her guests. Drexel ascended to the brilliant ball-room. A little later, while he was standing with his uncle and Prince Berloff, General Valenko, recognizing Berloff, paused a moment beside them. The military governor was straight, gray-haired, gray-bearded, a splendid figure of a soldier-statesman at sixty-five, his bearing and every feature marked with that pride which unbends only to equals, with strength, decision, dominance. There was also that in his face and bearing which suggested that his character was fibred with pitiless severity--with that despotic severity which becomes a mere matter of course after a lifetime of service to the most autocratic and cruel of Christian governments. “You would not think to look at him, would you,” said Drexel after the general had passed on, taking Berloff with him, “that he loves his daughter more than he does his life? Yet that is what people say.” Mr. Howard’s glance followed the straight, proud figure. “He looks to me more like that old Roman party--what do you call him, Brutus--that ordered his own son executed. The girl must be a wonder.” “They say half the best young nobility of Russia have proposed to her--and been refused.” “A sort of queen of hearts--eh?” “You guessed close, uncle, to what they call her. She is known as ‘The Princess of Hearts.’” “Well,” grumbled his uncle, “I wish she’d step lively. I’m getting anxious to see her.” And so was Drexel, a little, even if his heart did belong to a woman of quite a different station.