The mountain is visible but a moment.  An immense white fog-bank which has been crouching on the horizon rears suddenly and rushes across the ocean, whose low mutter rises to a roar.  It sweeps like a tidal wave across cliffs and Fort.  It halts abruptly against the face of the mountain.  In the same moment the ocean stills.  It would almost seem that Nature held her breath, awaiting some awful event.

Suddenly, in the very middle of the fog-bank, appears the shadowy figure of a woman.  She is gliding—­to the right—­rapidly and stealthily.  Youth is in her slender grace, her delicate profile, dimly outlined.  Her long silver-blond hair is unbound and luminously distinct from the white fog.  She walks swiftly across the lower table of the mountain, then disappears.  One sees, vaguely, a dark figure crouching along the lower fringe of the fog.  That, too, disappears.

For a moment the silence seems intensified.  Then, suddenly, it is crossed by a low whir—­a strange sound in the midnight.  Then a shriek whose like is never heard save when a soul is wrenched without warning in frightfullest torture from its body.  Then another and another and another in rapid succession, each fainter and more horrible in suggestion than the last.  With them has mingled the single frenzied cry of a man.  A moment later a confused hubbub arises from the Fort and town, followed by the flashes of many lights and the report of musketry.  Then the fog presses downward on the scene.  All sound but that of the ocean, which seems to have drawn into its loud dull voice all the angers of all the dead, ceases as though muffled.  The fog lingers a moment, then drifts back as it came, and Fort Ross is the Fort Ross of to-day.

And this is the story:—­

When the Princess Helene de Gagarin married Alexander Rotscheff, she little anticipated that she would spend her honeymoon in the northern wilds of the Californias.  Nevertheless, when her husband was appointed Governor of the Fort Ross and Bodega branch of the great Alaskan Fur Company, she volunteered at once to go with him—­being in that stage of devotion which may be termed the emotionally heroic as distinguished from the later of non-resistance.  As the exile would last but a few years, and as she was a lady of a somewhat adventurous spirit, to say nothing of the fact that she was deeply in love, her interpretation of wifely duty hardly wore the hue of martyrdom even to herself.

Notwithstanding, and although she had caused to be prepared a large case of books and eight trunks of ravishing raiment, she decided that life in a fort hidden between the mountains and the sea, miles away from even the primitive Spanish civilization, might hang burdensomely at such whiles as her husband’s duties claimed him and books ceased to amuse.  So she determined to ask the friend of her twenty-three years, the Countess Natalie Ivanhoff, to accompany her.  She had, also, an unselfish motive in so doing.  Not only did she cherish for the Countess Natalie a real affection, but her friend was as deeply wretched as she was happy.