The shears of destiny

Instead of the week Drexel had thought his business would keep him in Moscow, two days sufficed. They were a pleasant two days, rich with promise of future profit, and it was wi...

With her chin in one slender, exquisitely gloved hand, she stared out into the flying darkness. As for Drexel, not another thought went to America or to fortune-building. The mo...

Drexel walked to one of the long windows and gazed down into the bright street through which those absurd-looking yet comfortable little sleighs, the winter cabs of Russia, were...

As Drexel realized that she was gone, a pang of dizzy agony shot him through. What his uncle had said about his liking for Alice was perfectly true; it had been but a boy-and-gi...

“By order of The White One!” Drexel repeated--and the name of that great, impersonal, hidden leader went through him with a thrill of awed consternation. This was a serious situ...

Drexel slipped down and was standing at the table when the bolt shot back and she entered. She closed the door, and stood looking a moment at him, and he gazed back at her. Desp...

It was a dull room, Drexel’s prison, and Drexel’s presence did not brighten it. To have met and loved and lost a girl all within the space of twenty-four hours, was hardly an ex...

But first came Alice. Snow was upon her light fluffy hair and her long fur coat, and her cheeks were pink with the cold and her eyes bright with the excitement of this first mee...

And so this famous beauty, this proud daughter of Russia’s proudest nobility, was the unknown girl of his strange adventure, was the working-girl who had talked so passionately...

“Yes, I think I can trust you. There are your actions as proof. And then, had you wanted to betray me, you have had plenty of time to do so. Our ideals are separated by the widt...

The next day they all went down to Prince Berloff’s--the Howards, Sonya and her father, Countess Baronova, Drexel, the prince, and besides them half a dozen high-born men and wo...

After several more of the countess’s songs of Little Russia, and more vocal trapeze work by the lieutenant among his Italian arias, the company adjourned to the hall, a room so...

Sonya, cool, haughty, ignored the captain as a thing below her notice. “So I was,” she replied; “but I felt a little better and a few minutes ago I wandered in there to look at...

Drexel’s desperate eyes fell upon the electric-light key beside the doorway. He sprang swiftly forward, and the room was filled with blackness. He disliked leaving the countess...

Drexel sank down in the fine snow, his back against a patriarch pine that rose without a branch far up towards the stars; and he sat there amid that vast white silence, breathin...

She rose and crossed to him; and Ivan and Nicolai slipped out. She was dressed as he had seen her in this same room a week before--in the coarse, quilted jacket and head-swathin...

Sonya had taken her stand beside the wheeled chair, her hand lightly upon The White One’s shoulder. As Drexel gazed upon the two women, side by side, and gathered the significan...

At the coming on of dusk the next afternoon Sonya set out for the Fortress. All was staked on that one bold cast of the die--her brother’s freedom if she won, her capture if she...

As the bells of the little church ceased tolling seven Sonya paused a moment from her pacing. “Just about now they’ll be slipping his uniform into his cell,” she said.

As half a dozen of the gendarmes lunged in, Drexel saw Sonya deftly knock over the hallway’s single lamp. It went out as it fell, and the hall was darkness, save for the faint l...

“It is by taking big risks that you win big prizes! I thought that in the excitement of the moment they might let something drop that would be of great importance.”

This same evening Prince Berloff dined with the Howards at their hotel. There were a score of noble guests, the highest of the new friends Berloff would bring to Alice, and the...

Drexel turned from the Valenko mansion a few minutes before Berloff and his party entered it. Though harrowed by the evening’s misfortune, there was a minor matter of which he h...

As the general strode through the cell-lined corridors he swiftly planned his course. He had power to condemn, but in a case of such flagrant guilt he had not power to pardon. H...

The death silence that broods over the sombre dungeons of Peter and Paul brooded also over the library of Sabatoff. Drexel and the Keeper of the Seals sat looking each at the ot...

“Ring the bell, Ivan,” Drexel ordered. Ivan did so, and the gates slowly creaked open upon their frozen hinges. A sentry appeared, looking more a bear than a man in his huge she...

The prince stared about at the transfixed party. In all his life he had never been more astounded. But after the first moment he had his astonishment under perfect control. He r...

An hour would likely pass--with God’s grace more--ere the tenants of that dark room would be discovered and St. Petersburg’s ten thousand police and spies be unloosed upon the c...

The next fifteen minutes, when Drexel looks back upon them, present nothing but a blur of ecstatic relief. Distinct remembrance begins with his being ushered to a certain door--...