There's no doubt these three scoundrels expect reinforcements at any moment, and with them will be one who is the devil incarnate.

He's the only thing on earth that that brave girl fears.

It seems he is in love with her and has pestered her for years.
She hated the sight of him, but he wouldn't take no, and being a powerful man--rich and well-born and all the rest of it--she had a desperate time.

I gather he was pretty high in favour with the old Court.

Then when the Bolsheviks started he went over to them, like plenty of other grandees, and now he's one of their chief brains--none of your callow revolutionaries, but a man of the world, a kind of genius, she says, who can hold his own anywhere.