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The head continued to peer through the door, as if it had stuck there, moving neither to nor fro.

“Have you at last decided whether you will dress or not?” repeated Ivan in a yet gruffer voice.

Alexis waved his hand in utter helplessness.

“I will, it’s all the same!” and seeing the head did not disappear, but apparently awaited further orders, he added:

“Just another glass of orange liqueur. My head is splitting from last night’s drinking bout——”

The old man said nothing, yet his look plainly intimated, “It is not your head which ought to be aching after last night.”

Left to himself, the Tsarevitch clasped his fingers, stretched out his arms till all the joints cracked, and yawned. Shame, fear, sorrow, repentance, thirst for immediate heroism, all dissolved in this slow, hopeless yawn, which neither pain nor contortions could repress, which was more awful than any sob or groan.

In an hour’s time, washed and shaved, with hardly any trace of drink about him, dressed in a tightly-fitting officer’s uniform of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, of green cloth with red facings and golden galoon, he was wending his way to the Summer Palace along the Neva in a six-oared boat.