“But – how? Why? I just don’t know what you are – saying,” Shamara stammered.
“It is really quite simple, my lovely one. Alexander III died in November last year!”
“I-I don’t believe it!” Shamara gasped.
“It is true,” he answered, “and now his son, Nicholas, is on the Throne. He is a very different Czar in every way and the Russian Secret Police will, I do know, no longer be looking for you and, if they did find you, no one would dare to touch you as my wife.”
Shamara stared up at him as if she could not believe what she was hearing.
Then slowly, like the snow melting in the sunshine, the tears began to run down her cheeks.
“It – cannot be true,” she sobbed.
She hid her face against the Marquis’s shoulder.
Then, as the tears came faster, she was crying like a child who has been fri
