heard that a Papal Nuncio had been at Cracow, and that this
Nuncio had been a stout supporter of the pretender's claim?
What could be the Pope's concern in the Muscovite succession? Why
should a Roman priest support the claim of a prince to the throne
of a country devoted to the Greek faith?

At last all was clear indeed to Boris. Rome was at the bottom of
this business, whose true aim was the Romanization of Russia; and
Sigismund had fetched Rome into it, had set Rome on. Himself an
elected King of Poland, Sigismund may have seen in the ambitious
son of Stephen Bathory one who might perhaps supplant him on the
Polish throne. To divert his ambition into another channel he had
fathered--if he had not invented--this fiction that the pretender
was the dead Demetrius.

Had that fool Smirnoy Otrepiev but dealt frankly with him from
the first, what months of annoyance might he not have been
spared; how easy it might have been to prick this bubble of
imposture. But better late than never. To-morrow he would publish
the true facts, and all the world should know the truth; and it
was a truth that must give pause to those fools in this
superstitious Russia, so devoted to the Orthodox Greek Church,
who favoured the pretender. They should see the trap that was
being baited for them.

There was a banquet in the Kremlin that night to certain foreign
envoys, and Boris came to table in better spirits than he had
been for many a day. He was heartened by the thought of what was
now to do, by the conviction that he held the false Demetrius in
the hollow of his hand. There to those envoys he would announce