In manner she was cold, proud, repellent, though beneath the outward ice ran a fire of passion that once let loose would sweep away all barriers of conventionality, and stop at nothing to accomplish its desires.
Like Ivor, she was an orphan, and like him untitled, but there ran within her veins a strain of the great Catherine's blood, transmuted to her from an ancestor who could boast of Imperial favours, and of this bar sinister in the past Olga--for she it was--was prouder than of any patent of a lesser nobility. It may be that, generations intervening notwithstanding, this last fair representative of her race possessed some traits and characteristics of her Imperial ancestress, for like her, she was both strong and weak, impetuous and calculating, passionate and mercenary, forgiving and tyrannical; and was indeed a pure specimen of the Russian type, in which are so strongly and so dispassionately blended the master passions of cruelty and remorse.
Olga Naundorff had known no home save that of the Court, for though she inherited a fair property from her father, it was situated many long miles from Petersburg, on the southern frontier amidst the trackless wastes of the steppes, where for nine months continual snow reigned, and where the long dreariness of winter was fraught with the terror of isolation and dull monotony.
Olga remembered but little of this far-away home, and shunned such memories whenever they came to her, with an instinctive shrinking from the unknown and undesirable.
Her father, who had been a brave and gallant officer, who had served his country on many a battle-field, and loved his Tsar, the Alexander of good deeds, with a strong and fervent love, which nothing, not even the claims of his little daughter, could outweigh, and who was trusted and loved in return by his Emperor, brought the little motherless Olga, when but a child of ten, to Gatschina, presented her to the Tsar, demanding an asylum for the pretty child, whose mother was dead, and whose fearlessness and beauty made her the more open to an untoward fate.
The great Alexander was pleased to gratify his faithful friend and servant, and was also captivated by the tiny maid's rare loveliness; and so it came about that General Naundorff's desire was granted, and his little Olga became the pet and plaything of the Imperial Court. There she grew from girlhood to maidenhood, and, as her beauty developed more and more, and her intelligence expanded, she became a special favourite with the Tsar, to whose private apartments she had free access, and from whom she gained by her pretty imperious pleading, many a coveted favour for some loyal subject of his Majesty.