After ten minutes or so the man returned, saying: 

“The Colonel will see you if you will please step this way,” and following him he conducted me into the richly furnished private apartments of the Palace, across a great hall filled with fine paintings, and then up a long thickly-carpeted passage to a small, elegant room, where a tall bald-headed man in military uniform stood awaiting me.

“Your name is M’sieur Gregg,” he exclaimed in very good French, “and I understand you desire audience of his Excellency, the Governor-General.  I regret, however, that he never gives audience to strangers.”

“The matter upon which I desire to see his Excellency is of a purely private and confidential nature,” I said, for used as I was to the ways of foreign officialdom, I spoke with the same firm courtesy as himself.

“I am very sorry, m’sieur, but I fear it will be necessary in that case for you to write to his Excellency, and mark your letter ‘personal.’  It will then go into the Governor-General’s own hands.”

“What I have to say cannot be committed to writing,” was my reply.  “I must see Baron Oberg upon a matter which affects him personally, and which admits of no delay.”

He glanced at me quickly, and then in a low voice inquired: 

“Is it in regard to a—­well, a conspiracy?”

His question instantly suggested to me a ruse, and I replied in the affirmative.

“Then you can place the facts before me without the slightest hesitation,” he said, going to the door and slipping the bolt into its socket.  “Anything spoken into my ear is as though it were spoken into that of his Excellency himself.”

“I much regret, M’sieur the Colonel, that I must see the Baron in person.”

“Has the plot assassination as its object—­or revolt?” he asked pointedly.

“That I will explain to the Baron only.”

“But I tell you he will not see you.  We have so many persons here with secret information concerning Finnish conspiracies against our Russian rule.  Why, if his Excellency saw everyone who desired to see him, he would be compelled to give audience the whole twenty-four hours round.”

At a glance I saw that this elegant Colonel, who seemed to take the greatest pride over his exquisitely kept person and his spotless uniform, did not intend to allow me the satisfaction of an audience of that most hated official of the Czar.  The latter was in fear of the dagger, the pistol, or the bomb, and consequently hedged himself in by persons of the Colonel’s type—­courteous, diplomatic, but utterly unbending.  After some further argument, I said at last in a firm tone: 

“I wish to impress upon you the extreme importance of the information I have to impart, and can only repeat that it is a matter concerning his Excellency privately.  Will you therefore do me the favor to take my name to him?”

“His Excellency refuses to be troubled with the names of strangers,” was his cold reply, as he turned over my card in his hand.