Truxton King

His daughter, Olga, was recognised as one of the most beautiful and cultured young women in Warsaw. Her suitors seemed to be without number; nor were they confined to the student and untitled classes with whom she was naturally thrown by force of circumstance. More than one lordly adventurer in the lists of love paid homage to her grace and beauty. Finally there came one who conquered and was beloved. He was the son of a mighty duke, a prince of the blood.

It was true love for both of them. The young prince pledged himself to marry her, despite all opposition; he was ready to give up his noble inheritance for the sake of love. But there were other forces greater than a young man's love at work. The all-powerful ruler of an Empire learned of this proposed mesalliance and was horrified. Two weeks afterward the prince was called. The will of the Crown was made known to him and--he obeyed. Olga Platanova was cast aside but not forgotten. He became the husband of an unloved, scrawny lady of diadems. When the situation became more than he could bear he blew out his brains.

When Olga heard the news of his death she was not stricken by grief. She cried out her joy to a now cloudless sky, for he had justified the great love that had been theirs and would be theirs to the end of time.

From a passive believer in the doctrines of her father and his circle she became at once their most impassioned exponent. Over night she changed from a gentle-hearted girl into a woman whose breast flamed with a lust for vengeance against a class from which death alone could free her lover. She threw herself, heart and soul, into the deliberations and transactions of the great red circle: her father understood and yet was amazed.

Then he was put to death by the class she had come to hate. One more stone in the sepulchre of her tender, girlish ideals. When the time came she travelled to Graustark in response to the call of the Committee of Ten; she came prepared to kill the creature she would be asked to kill. And yet down in her heart she was sore afraid.

She was there, not to kill a man grown old in wrongs to her people, but to destroy the life of a gentle, innocent boy of seven!

There were times when her heart shrank from the unholy deed she had been selected to perform; she even prayed that death might come to her before the hour in which she was to do this execrable thing in behalf of the humanity she served. But there was never a thought of receding from the bloody task set down for her--a task so morbid, so horrid that even the most vicious of men gloated in the satisfaction that they had not been chosen in her place. Weeks before she came to Graustark Olga Platanova had been chosen by lot to be the one to do this diabolical murder. She did not flinch, but came resolute and ready. Even the men in the Committee of Ten looked upon the slender, dark-eyed girl with an awe that could not be conquered. She had not the manner of an assassin, and yet they knew that she would not draw back; she was as soft and as sweet as the Madonnas they secretly worshipped, and yet her heart was steeled to a purpose that appalled the fiercest of them.