in a skeptical tone:  ’Il n’aurait jamais cru le fait si ces messieurs n’avaient pu lui jurer L’avoir vu!...  Tout ce que j’ai predit!...  Les faux nobles,—­les plagiaires!’ which means in English, “He couldn’t have believed the thing unless these gentlemen had sworn they witnessed it!...  All that I predicted!...  The sham nobles!... the stealing authors!” The comment set me thinking.

“Who is he?  I asked myself.  Inside of five minutes I had heard him speak in English, in Russian and in French!  I am certain that he is not a Frenchman,—­although his accent would have proclaimed him a native of the Avenue des Champs Elysees.  He had a Danish countenance, the eyes of English Royalty and the forehead of an early Christian martyr.

“No one I have talked to on the island seems certain of his identity.  Some take the view that he is a retired millionaire, judging from the refined simplicity of his family and the strict guard the Government has furnished to protect his undisturbed retirement.  Others hint that he may be, possibly, some very high dignitary, judging from the almost Royal homage that some people in the city pay to his person and family.

“The only reliable information I got about him was that he arrived upon the island aboard a man-o’-war accompanied by one of the richest tea merchants in the Empire.  He declines all membership in any of the clubs, apparently satisfied to spend the time among his orchids and the lovely white-robed debutantes I saw blooming in that fascinating garden.

“Naturally I was very curious about the identity of this secluded family.  But the only information given out about them by the chivalrous tea merchant or the Government officials is simply, ’Oh, the family have friends in India and are living in retirement.’”

One would be very bold to say, after reading the foregoing, that the personages described were the same people who had been driven out of the Winter Palace upon the ebb-tide of their Imperial splendor a few months before.  Yet a long and somewhat intimate interest in the underground diplomacy of the world will lead one thus engaged to piece together stray bits of gossip that come from different sources to check up the information that some others may possess.  In this way will the letter of an American who was held incommunicado at Geneva by the Swiss Government in the latter part of 1919, be found exceedingly persuasive in the process of reconstructing the tragic comedy which struts around the vacant Russian throne.  The American was en route to Turkestan under proper credentials from the United States; yet there were certain powerful combinations sufficiently interested in his mission to cause his imprisonment for a time sufficiently lengthy to enable their emissaries to precede him beyond the Caspian, where other secret combinations were incubating that American foreign traders would have given much to understand.