This was Ivor Tolskoi. We have seen him before, in the inner sanctum of the Chancellerie, when Vladimir Mellikoff accepted his mission; and Ivor cursed the fate that trembling in the balance, fell in the favour of the older and more experienced man, and thus shut him out from winning his first spurs in the service of his master.
Ivor Tolskoi was, in many ways, an _enfant gâté_ of his world. He was an orphan, and very rich; a ward of the Tsar's, owning large estates in the wild Ural province, which he seldom visited, and serfs whose numbers he had never counted, who were free in name only, and whose sole use in the world was so to labour for him that his revenues year by year never failed, and never grew less. He owned no title, and he would have scorned the acceptance of any mere bauble of to-day's creation; he would have told you, with a toss of his golden head and a ringing laugh, that the Tolskois were lords of the soil and of human souls long centuries before Peter came to the Imperial throne, and raised his nation from out their barbaric indolence; and that while the imperious Tsar was learning ship-building at Deptford, his ancestor of that period was riding at large over his vast properties, hunting the wild boar and the wolf, the ermine and marten, across his own territory, whose boundaries not even he could define. It would ill become him, then, the last scion of his grand old race, to accept a tawdry title in place of his own simple name, Ivor Tolskoi, which each eldest son had born in succession for generation after generation, and before which the peasants upon his wide western property turned pale and trembled.
His companion was his equal in feminine beauty, and there were many circumstances in the life of each strangely similar, which served to draw them closer together, and more intimately than is usually the case in a country and a Court where etiquette governs rather than affinity.
The face of the young woman who leant back negligently against the pile of velvet cushions Ivor had placed for her, was strangely beautiful, with the weird, almost unholy beauty of an enchantress of old; such beauty as Faustine wore, or Cleopatra, or Messalina, which enslaves the senses at once, without leaving any loophole for calm reason. She too was tall and grand of build, though slight, as became her three-and-twenty years; her shoulders bore the curves of the Milo Venus; her neck and bosom fell in the round charming lines of maidenhood; her head rose proudly from the short classic pillar of her throat, and was carried with an almost royal grace; the sweep from chin to ear was perfect in its fine symmetry; the low arched forehead bespoke more than ordinary intelligence; beneath it her eyes, set wide apart and wearing a look of innocent fearlessness, were of the deepest shade of violet, to which the black lashes and pencilled brows gave the piquancy of unexpectedness, for her hair, which was rolled high in heavy masses and fastened with a jewelled arrow, was brown in colour, shot through with a thousand lights of golden auburn; her complexion was pale but warm, and the small perfectly modelled bow of her mouth was tinged with vivid crimson, adding the perfecting note to her ideal countenance.