Army, they declared, was dependent upon a sound nutritive diet obtainable only through the operation of certain radioactive oxydised magneto-carbon-hydrates which exist nowhere save in the muscular tissue of animals.  This new heresy endangered the very foundations of Empire!  They were not people to compromise where questions of national prosperity were concerned.  They suggested, privately, that he should cancel his Revelation.  He refused.  They then sent him a confidential messenger offering the choice of assassination or deportation within the space of three hours.  He inclined to the latter alternative, and was straightway conveyed to the frontier by special train with as many rouble notes in his pocket as he had been able to scrape together in the flurry of departure.  Some disturbances broke out when the news of his banishment became known; a few whiffs of grape-shot worked wonders.  The majority of his adherents abjured their error; the rest of them, aided by charitable contributions from a secret committee of enthusiasts, found their way abroad to dwell under the shadow of the banished Messiah.  The expiatory period was approaching.  Russia, on the whole, was glad to see the last of him—­particularly the Grand Ducal party.

A broken man, he decided to establish himself on Nepenthe, drawn thither partly on account of the climate but chiefly by the report of its abounding lobsters and fishes, an article of diet of which he was inordinately fond.  Disciples followed singly, and in batches.  Their scarlet blouses became a familiar object in the streets of the place; good-natured and harmless folks for the most part who, if they ran up bills with the local trades-people which they failed to pay, did so not out of natural dishonesty but because they had no money.  They used to bathe, in summertime, at a certain little cove near the foot of the promontory on which Madame Steynlin’s villa was situated.  She watched their naked antics at first with disapproval—­what could you expect, she would say, from Russians?  Then she observed them eating raw crabs and things.  It struck her that they must be hungry.  Being a lady of the sentimental type, childless, and never so happy as when feeding or mothering somebody, she took to sending them down baskets of food, or carrying it herself.  They were so poor, so far from their homes, so picturesque in those red shirts and leathern belts!

Of late years Madame Steynlin had given up marrying, having at last, after many broken hopes, definitely convinced herself that husbands were only after her money.  Rightly or wrongly, she wanted to be loved for herself; loved, she insisted, body and soul.  Even as the fires of Erebus slumber beneath their mantle of ice, she concealed, under a varnish of conventionality—­the crust was not so thick in her case—­a nature throbbing with passion.  She was everlastingly unappeased, because incurably romantic.  All life, she truly declared, is a search for a friend.  Unfortunately she sought with her eyes open, having never grasped the elementary truth that to find a friend one must close one eye:  to keep him—­two.  She always attributed to men qualities which, she afterwards discovered, they did not possess.  Her life since the marrying period had been a breathless succession of love affairs, each more eternal than the last.