Four days later the old Princess Chechevinski was buried in the Nevski monastery.

On his return from the monastery, young Prince Chechevinski went straight for the strong box, which he had hitherto seen only at a distance, and even then only rarely.  He expected to find a great deal more money in it than he found—­some hundred and fifty thousand rubles; a hundred thousand in his late mother’s name, and fifty thousand in his own.  This was the personal property of the old princess, a part of her dowry.  The young prince made a wry face—­the money might last him two or three years, not more.  During the lifetime of the old princess no one had known accurately how much she possessed, so that it never even entered the young prince’s head to ask whether she had not had more.  He was so unmethodical that he never even looked into her account book, deciding that it was uninteresting and not worth while.

That same day the janitor of one of the huge, dirty tenements in Vosnesenski Prospekt brought to the police office notice of the fact that the Pole, Kasimir Bodlevski, had left the city; and the housekeeper of the late Princess Chechevinski informed the police that the serf girl Natalia Pavlovna (Natasha) had disappeared without leaving a trace, which the housekeeper now announced, as the three days’ limit had elapsed.

At that same hour the little ship of a certain Finnish captain was gliding down the Gulf of Bothnia.  The Finn stood at the helm and his young son handled the sails.  On the deck sat a young man and a young woman.  The young woman carried, in a little bag hung round her neck, two hundred and forty-four thousand rubles in bills, and she and her companion carried pistols in their pockets for use in case of need.  Their passports declared that the young woman belonged to the noble class, and was the widow of a college assessor, her name being Maria Solontseva, while the young man was a Pole, Kasimir Bodlevski.

The little ship was crossing the Gulf of Bothnia toward the coast of Sweden.

VIII

BACK TO RUSSIA

In the year 1858, in the month of September, the “Report of the St. Petersburg City Police” among the names of “Arrivals” included the following: 

     Baroness van Doering, Hanoverian subject. 
     Ian Vladislav Karozitch, Austrian subject.

The persons above described might have been recognized among the fashionable crowds which thronged the St. Petersburg terminus of the Warsaw railway a few days before:  A lady who looked not more than thirty, though she was really thirty-eight, dressed with simple elegance, tall and slender, admirably developed, with beautifully clear complexion, piercing, intelligent gray eyes, under finely outlined brows, thick chestnut hair, and a firm mouth—­almost a beauty, and with an expression of power, subtlety and decision.  “She is either a queen or a criminal,” a physiognomist would have said after observing her face.  A gentleman with a red beard, whom the lady addressed as “brother,” not less elegantly dressed, and with the same expression of subtlety and decision.  They left the station in a hired carriage, and drove to Demuth’s Hotel.