The two men bowed gravely to each other.  Steinmetz threw open the door of the great room and stood aside.  The prince passed on, and the German followed him, each playing his part gravely, as men in high places are called to do.  When the door was closed behind them and they were alone, there was no relaxation, no smile of covert derision.  These men knew the Russian character thoroughly.  There is, be it known, no more impressionable man on the face of God’s earth.  Paul and Steinmetz had played their parts so long that these came to be natural to them as soon as they passed the Volga.  We are all so in a minor degree.  In each house, to each of our friends, we are unconsciously different in some particular.  One man holds us in awe, and we unconsciously instil that feeling.  Another considers us a buffoon, and, lo! we are exceedingly funny.

Paul and Steinmetz knew that the people around them in Osterno were somewhat like the dumb and driven beast.  These peasants required overawing by a careful display of pomp—­an unrelaxed dignity.  The line of demarcation between the noble and the peasant is so marked in the land of the Czar that it is difficult for Englishmen to realize or believe it.  It is like the line that is drawn between us and our dogs.  If we suppose it possible that dogs could be taught to act and think for themselves; if we take such a development as practicable, and consider the possibilities of social upheaval lying behind such an education, we can in a minute degree realize the problem which Prince Pavlo Alexis and all his fellow-nobles will be called upon to solve within the lifetime of men already born.

CHAPTER X

THE MOSCOW DOCTOR

“Colossal!” exclaimed Steinmetz, beneath his breath.  With a little trick of the tongue he transferred his cigar from the right-hand to the left-hand corner of his mouth.  “Colossal—­l!” he repeated.

For a moment Paul looked up from the papers spread out on the table before him—­looked with the preoccupied air of a man who is adding up something in his mind.  Then he returned to his occupation.  He had been at this work for four hours without a break.  It was nearly one o’clock in the morning.  Since dinner Karl Steinmetz had consumed no less than five cigars, while he had not spoken five words.  These two men, locked in a small room in the middle of the castle of Osterno—­a room with no window, but which gained its light from the clear heaven by a shaft and a skylight on the roof—­locked in thus they had been engaged in the addition of an enormous mass of figures.  Each sheet had been carefully annotated and added by Steinmetz, and as each was finished he handed it to his companion.

“Is that fool never coming?” asked Paul, with an impatient glance at the clock.

“Our very dear friend the starosta,” replied Steinmetz, “is no slave to time.  He is late.”