ended, Alister came close behind him, and there stood, his bosom
heaving with emotion, his eyes burning with a dry fire. Ian was
perfectly composed, his voice quiet and low.

I will not give his tale in the first person; and will tell of it
only as much as I think it necessary my reader should know.

Having accepted a commission of the Czar, he was placed in a post of
trust in the palace.

In one apartment of it, lived an imperial princess, the burden of
whose rank had not even the alleviation of society. Her disclosure
of a sympathy with oppressed humanity had wakened a doubt as to her
politics, and she was virtually a prisoner, restricted to a corner
of the huge dwelling, and allowed to see hardly any but her women.
Her father had fallen into disgrace before her, and her mother was
dead of grief. All around her were spies, and love was nowhere.
Gladly would she have yielded every rag of her rank, to breathe the
air of freedom. To be a peasant girl on her father's land, would be
a life of rapture!

She knew little of the solace books might have given her. With a
mind capable of rapid development, she had been ill taught except in
music; and that, alone, cannot do much for spiritual development; it
cannot enable the longing, the aspiration it rouses, to understand
itself; it cannot lead back to its own eternal source.

She knew no one in whom to trust, or from whom to draw comfort; her
confessor was a man of the world, incapable of leading her to any
fountain of living water; she had no one to tell her of God and his