Page:By order of the Czar.djvu/296



284 Y ORDER OP THE CZAR.

great war take place for supremacy in the East, England would have to reckon in the first attacks upon the distant outposts of her empire. A great, successful, popular man, General Petronovitch ; a libertine, unfaithful to his wife even in the honeymoon ; a tyrant, but a soldier of re- source ; physically brave and a favorite of the Russian Army.

He went forth on that night prior to the illuminations of Venice, the night next to that of the countess' reception, with the feelings of a conqueror who could no more be resisted in the tents of Cupid than in the camp of Mars. And yet he sat at his inamorata's feet in professed humble worship of hej beauty, grateful for her gentle condescension, and Anna plied him with sweet words and suggested promises that fooled him to the top of his bent.

She was dreamy, poetical, allowed her soft hand to be pressed. How Philip would have hated Petronovitch, and her too, perhaps, could he have had a glimpse of the wooing of the Russian general and the responsive murmurs of the violet-eyed countess.

It was well that the general did not see Anna's face, except in the subdued light of the moon ; nor, indeed, note the satisfied smile of the principal gondolier, Paul Petroski, who was busy with thoughts that alternately influenced the sinister side of his mouth, and alternately the comedy side, though the sinister gave a touch of its cynicism to the other.

It was a glorious night, as Petronovitch had more than once remarked, and there was music on the water ; and more particularly the song of pleasure, Funiculi Funcula, and the Ave Maria too. The gondoliers had joined in the last verses of the former, and Petronovitch himself had hummed the Italian words as he stole his arm round Anna's waist. She, too, had chanted some lines of the chorus with a merry abandon; for, with a gay ferocity,