Read it through once
It was fortunate for every one that he stood where he did, as no one outside the Royal Castle could have been to the young Czar what the Prince was at Livadia, and afterwards. In the long and almost terrible pilgrimage to the tomb which followed, when the corpse of the dead Czar was carried in solemn state from the shores of the Black Sea to the tomb in the Cathedral that stands on the frozen Neva, the Prince was always at the right hand of the Czar. Alike in public or in private, the uncle and the nephew stood side by side. After the first gush of grief had passed, it was impossible but that thoughts of the relations between the two Empires should not have crossed the minds of both. These two men share between them the over lordship of Asia. To the Czar, the north from the Oural to the far Sagahlien; to the other, the south from the Straits of Babel Mandeb to Hong Kong. No two men on this planet ever represented so vast a range of Imperial power as the first mourners at the bier of Alexander the Third.