terrible duties as those at Moscow, when he is so good at heart.  These things are easy enough for wicked people, but for good men, for good men who can reason it out, who know what they do and that they are condemned to death into the bargain, it is terrible, it is terrible!  Why, I told him the moment things began to go wrong in Moscow, ’You know what to expect, Feodor.  Here is a dreadful time to get through — make out you are sick.’  I believed he was going to strike me, to kill me on the spot.  ’I!  Betray the Emperor in such a moment!  His Majesty, to whom I owe everything!  What are you thinking of, Matrena Petrovna!’ And he did not speak to me after that for two days.  It was only when he saw I was growing very ill that he pardoned me, but he had to be plagued with my jeremiads and the appealing looks of Natacha without end in his own home each time we heard any shooting in the street.  Natacha attended the lectures of the Faculty, you know.  And she knew many of them, and even some of those who were being killed on the barricades.  Ah, life was not easy for him in his own home, the poor general!  Besides, there was also Boris, whom I love as well, for that matter, as my own child, because I shall be very happy to see him married to Natacha — there was poor Boris who always came home from the attacks paler than a corpse and who could not keep from moaning with us.”

“And Michael?” questioned Rouletabille.

“Oh, Michael only came towards the last.  He is a new orderly to the general.  The government at St. Petersburg sent him, because of course they couldn’t help learning that Boris rather lacked zeal in repressing the students and did not encourage the general in being as severe as was necessary for the safety of the Empire.  But Michael, he has a heart of stone; he knows nothing but the countersign and massacres fathers and mothers, crying, ’Vive le Tsar!’ Truly, it seems his heart can only be touched by the sight of Natacha.  And that again has caused a good deal of anxiety to Feodor and me.  It has caught us in a useless complication that we would have liked to end by the prompt marriage of Natacha and Boris.  But Natacha, to our great surprise, has not wished it to be so.  No, she has not wished it, saying that there is always time to think of her wedding and that she is in no hurry to leave us.  Meantime she entertains herself with this Michael as if she did not fear his passion, and neither has Michael the desperate air of a man who knows the definite engagement of Natacha and Boris.  And my step-daughter is not a coquette.  No, no.  No one can say she is a coquette.  At least, no one had been able to say it up to the time that Michael arrived.  Can it be that she is a coquette?  They are mysterious, these young girls, very mysterious, above all when they have that calm and tranquil look that Natacha always has; a face, monsieur, as you have noticed perhaps, whose beauty is rather passive whatever one says and does, excepting