The younger of these women in their unsullied maidenhood looked longingly and unsuspectingly in the direction of Siberia.  They were learning by degrees that the semblance of freedom which offered a pathway to escape was nothing but a strategem employed by pretended friends to entrap them into more cruel and ruthless hands.  On every side loomed the evidence of their danger.  The villainous stares of foreign interlopers, the ribald jests of guards, the furtive glances of the envious, the scowls of the emancipated underling, the profanity of the domineering agitator who denounced respectability and clamored for possession of the girls,—­no moment of their lives was free from ugly threats; no retreat, save the wild jungle or the mountains, offered any liberation from the immodest glare of cruel, licentious eyes. (See Part II:  Tobolsk.)

The eldest of the girls was scarcely twenty-two.  Like her mother, she was erect and stately and somewhat saddened by the hostile experiences through which the family had just passed.  The youngest was a chummy little creature of sixteen years who did not conceal her admiration for her next elder sister, whose courage seemed unfailing through all the trying hours.  The next eldest sister, with her little younger brother, was openly planning to outwit the guard and escape to the Siberian wilds.  It was doubtless her undisguised activity that ultimately betrayed the Royal prisoners into the unhappy tangle that beset their future lives.

From one camp to another they were carted off like cattle and never for a moment permitted to forget that, if they ever reached a place of safety, they would have to pay the price.  Along the frozen pathway of their weary eastern journey there did come, here and there, some slender little byways that offered an escape.  Whenever they approached these places and estimated the perils, they found no one to confide in—­there were none that they could trust.  Treason, like a contagion, lurked in smiles as well as scowls about them, and even their steadfast trust in the Invisible Diplomacy of European Royalty was gradually yielding in their hearts to the dissolving acid of despair.  (See Part II:  Tobolsk.)

From the conflicting rumors that reached them they fully realized that it was the politician in all countries who ignorantly obstructed their relief.  The ferocious and misleading propaganda employed to fanaticize the populace as an element of military strategy seemed to sweep its own authors from their feet and drag the prisoners through many months of torture toward a time and place set for their execution by other politicians in the drunken stupor of their power. (See Part II:  Tobolsk.)