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"If you have been the Prince's men all your lives, what will you do when you leave me, now that the Prince and Princess are dead and the estates are broken up?" he asked them.

A moment before they had all been laughing and chatting volubly with the vivacity of children. Paul had been snapping his fingers and humming the tune of a Russian folk song. They were suddenly dumb.

"You will go back to Russia? You have wives and families perhaps?"

"We have wives and families," Alexis groaned, "but whether we shall ever see them again God only knows. It is a dunghill which we have left. There is no Russia."

"You don't believe in the new freedom then?" Haven asked.

"What does that mean to those of us who have served the Prince?" Alexis growled. "The people are mad. They have red poison."

"When we leave you," Paul confided in broken English, "we shall go south. In Georgia there may be hope. Around Moscow and in Petrograd we are known as the Ostrekoff men who have sometimes guarded the Tsar. There will be nothing but a prison or the wall there for us."