Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 200: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

192 HER ROYAL LOVER. if they found you offensive in high places, they quickly and easily dispatched you to the Pacific coast. He was thinking, then, that for the present, it would be more prudent not to inquire into it and to remain where he was. Twelve days after his installation in Caucasus he received a shock, under the stroke of which he was felled to the earth. “A large letter for his highness!” It was Vassili again, the faithful Vassili, who, having follywed his master in his disgrace, was speaking thus while handing him a letter which bore the official seal. Why, at this very simple news, did a strange throbbing agitate Mineleko’s heart? Slowly he ascended the stairs, determined to open the letter only when he should be entirely alone. Arrived in his chamber, he leaned for a moment against the frame of an open window; his forehead resting upon his large hand, his fingers buried in his thick hair, a veritable thick and black lion’s mane which the wind was stirring, he was listening me- chanically to the confused and distant murmurs which were rising from the drowsy fields, a harmo- nious concert of water, trees, and zephyrs, the even- ing song of grateful nature, in the divine language of starry and serene nights. The moon, like a silver disk, was diifusing a light which seemed to lighten his gloomy soul. To all those voices, to all those murmurs, the stings of a reproachful conscience were responding; the months, the weeks, the hours even of the first days of his marriage were crowding in multitudes in his heavy head. How the little Najeska Ivanowna had loved the sublime and silent language of those nights! How Gomicbooksscéo m