Olga Romanoff. George Chetwynd Griffith

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СКАЧАТЬ formulæ for the most powerful explosives then known to science, and minute instructions for their preparation. At the bottom of the page which contained these, there was a little strip of parchment, fastened by one end to the binding of the other sheets, and covered with very small writing.

      Olga’s eyes, wandering down over the maze of figures which crowded the page, reached it before Serge’s did. One quick glance told her that it was something very different to the rest. She laid one hand carelessly over it, and with the other softly caressed Serge’s crisp, golden curls. As he looked round in response to the caress, their eyes met, and she said in her sweet, low, witching voice—

      “Dearest, I have a favour to ask of you.”

      “Not a favour to ask, but a command to give, you mean. Speak, and you are obeyed. Have I not sworn obedience?” he replied, laying his hand upon her shoulder and drawing her lovely face closer to his as he spoke.

      “No, it is only a favour,” she said, with such a smile as Antony might have seen on the lips of Cleopatra. “I want you to leave me alone for a little time—for half an hour—and then come back and finish reading this with me. You know my brain is not as strong as yours, and I feel a little bewildered with all the wonderful things that there are in this legacy of my father’s father.

      “Before we go any further, I should like to read it all through again by myself, so as to understand it thoroughly. So suppose you go to your smoking-room for a little, and leave me to do so. I shall not take very long, and then we will go over the rest together.”

      “But we have only a couple more pages to read, sweet one, and then I will go over it all again with you, and explain anything that you have not understood.”

      As he spoke, Serge’s eyes never wavered for a moment from hers. Could he but have broken their spell, he might have seen that she was hiding something from him under her little, white hand and shapely arm. She brought her red, smiling lips still nearer to his as she almost whispered in reply—

      “Well, it is only a girl’s whim, after all, but still I am a girl. Come, now, I will give you a kiss for twenty minutes’ solitude, and when you come back, and we have finished our task, you shall have as many more as you like.”

      The sweet, tempting lips came closer still, and the witching spell of her great dusky eyes grew stronger as she spoke. How was he to know what was hanging in the balance in that fateful moment? He was but a hot-blooded youth of twenty, and he worshipped this lovely, girlish temptress, who had not yet seen seventeen summers, with an adoration that blinded him to all else but her and her intoxicating beauty.

      He drew her yielding form to him until he could feel her heart beating against his, and as their lips met, the promised kiss came from hers to his. He returned it threefold, and then his arm slipped from her shoulder to her waist, and he lifted her like a child from her chair, and carried her, half laughing and half protesting, to the door, claimed and took another kiss before he released her, and then put her down and left her alone without another word.

      “Alas, poor Serge!” she said, as the door closed behind him; “you are not the first man who has lost the empire of the world for a woman’s kiss. Before, I saw that you were my equal and helpmate, now you and all other men—yes, not even excepting he who seems so far above me now—shall be my slaves and do my bidding, so blindly that they shall not even know they are doing it.

      “Yes, the weapons of war are worth much, but what are they in comparison with the souls of the men who will have to use them!”

      In half an hour Serge came back to finish the reading of the will with her. The little slip of paper had been removed so skilfully that it would have been impossible for him to have even guessed that it had ever been attached to the parchment, or that it was now lying hidden in the bosom of the girl who would have killed him without the slightest scruple to gain the unsuspected possession of it.

CHAPTER IV.

       A SON OF THE GODS.

       Table of Contents

      ON the day but one following the reading of Paul Romanoff’s secret will, Olga and Serge set out for St. Petersburg, to convey his ashes to their last resting-place in the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul in the Fortress of Petropaulovski, where reposed the dust of the Tyrants of Russia, from Peter the Great to Alexander II. of Russia, now only remembered as the chief characters in the dark tragedy of the days before the Revolution.

      The intense love of the Russians for their country had survived the tremendous change that had passed over the face of society, and it was still the custom to bring the ashes of those who claimed noble descent and deposit them in one of their national churches, even when they had died in distant countries.

      The station from which they started was a splendid structure of marble, glass, and aluminium steel, standing in the midst of a vast, abundantly-wooded garden, which occupied the region that had once been made hideous by the slums and sweating-dens of Southwark. The ground floor was occupied by waiting-rooms, dining-saloons, conservatories, and winter-gardens, for the convenience and enjoyment of travellers; and from these lifts rose to the upper storey, where the platforms and lines lay under an immense crystal arch.

      Twelve lines ran out of the station, divided into three sets of four each. Of these, the centre set was entirely devoted to continental traffic, and the lines of this system stretched without a break from London to Pekin.

      The cars ran suspended on a single rail upheld by light, graceful arches of a practically unbreakable alloy of aluminium, steel, and zinc, while about a fifth of their weight was borne by another single insulating rail of forged glass—the rediscovery of the lost art of making which had opened up immense possibilities to the engineers of the twenty-first century.

      Along this lower line the train ran, not on wheels, but on lubricated bearings, which glided over it with no more friction than that of a steel skate on ice. On the upper rail ran double-flanged wheels with ball-bearings, and this line also conducted the electric current from which the motive-power was derived.

      The two inner lines of each set were devoted to long-distance, express traffic, and the two outer to intermediate transit, corresponding to the ordinary trains of the present day. Thus, for example, the train by which Olga and Serge were about to travel, stopped only at Brussels, Berlin, Königsberg, Moscow, Nijni Novgorod, Tomsk, Tobolsk, Irkutsk, and Pekin, which was reached by a line running through the Salenga valley and across the great desert of Shamoo, while from Irkutsk another branch of the line ran north-eastward viâ Yakutsk to the East Cape, where the Behring Bridge united the systems of the Old World and the New.

      The usual speed of the expresses was a hundred and fifty miles an hour, rising to two hundred on the long runs; and that of the ordinary trains, from a hundred to a hundred and fifty. Higher speeds could of course be attained on emergencies, but these had been found to be quite sufficient for all practical purposes.

      The cars were not unlike the Pullmans of the present day, save that they were wider and roomier, and were built not of wood and iron, but of aluminium and forged glass. Their interiors were, of course, absolutely impervious to wind and dust, even at the highest speed of the train, although a perfect system of ventilation kept their atmosphere perfectly fresh.

      The long-distance trains were fitted СКАЧАТЬ