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I heard him out and then dressed him. You may be sure that I was pleased enough, since Paris was just stagnation then, and it was queer if something did not turn up in a new city and among new people. Little did I think, however, that this was the last journey Sir Nicolas Steele and I were to make together. Yet so it proved, as this story will tell you.

We arrived in St. Petersburg on a Wednesday morning, and by the following Saturday night I had learned enough Russian to bawl "Hisworshik" to a cabman and to get a glass of beer at a bar. The man whose guests we were took us to the Hôtel Klee; but I soon found that we were not to stop long in the city, he being about to set out for the house of one of his kinswomen, whose place was ten miles from Novgorod. And here let me say that Count Fédor Uspensky was never a friend to me, though I stood by him to the end of it. He was a cur right through; a swaggering, bullying, loud-mouthed swashbuckler that set my right arm itching every time he came near me. How it was that he made a friend of Nicolas Steele the Lord only knows. Yet friends they were from the first; and I don't think my master ever did so much for any man as he did for this little Russian captain, who was his host in St. Petersburg. It was a sight to see these two, just as different as chalk from cheese, walking arm- in-arm down the Nevski Prospekt, or ogling the women in Isaac's cathedral. Perhaps it was that each