Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/65

 the case of Colonel Alexandrevitch. He and Tsargradev, at sunset, were strolling arm-in-arm in the Dunayskiy Prospekt, when the Colonel was shot by some person concealed in the shrubberies, who was never captured. Tsargradev and his friends broached the theory, which gained pretty general acceptance, that the shot had been intended for the Prime Minister himself, and that the death of Colonel Alexandrevitch was an accident due to bad aiming. It is now perfectly well established that the death of the Colonel was due to very good aiming indeed; that the assassin was M. Tsargradev's own hireling; and that perhaps the best reason why the police could never lay hands on him had some connection with the circumstance that the poor wretch, that very night, was strangled and cast into the Danube.

Oh, they manage these things in a highly unlikely and theatrical manner, in the far south-east of Europe!

But the particular circumstances of M. Tsargradev's downfall were amusingly illustrative of the character of the Queen. Ce que femme veult, Dieu le veult. And though her husband talked of the Constitution, and pleaded the necessity of evidence, Anéli was unconvinced. To get rid of Tsargradev, by one method or another, was her fixed idea, her determined purpose; she bided her time, and in the end she accomplished it.

It befell, during the seventh month of my stay in the Palace, that a certain great royal wedding was appointed to be celebrated at Dresden: a festivity to which were bidden all the crowned heads and most of the royal and semi-royal personages of Christendom, and amongst them the Basile and Basilitsa of Monterosso.

"It will cost us a pretty sum of money," Theodore grumbled, when